It is June, 2015. I am sixteen and I wear a rabbit’s heart. I ride an auto early each Monday morning to arrive at my mathematics tuition before anyone else. Our tutor is pleasantly surprised by my recent prowess in the subject. No one knows this yet, but there is someone in the class I really want to sit next to. I have to tell her of my dream from last night, to ask if she remembers hers. Last week, she had asked me if I write my dreams down when I wake. Who does that? I laughed the way one does when they are young and the world is still a deck of cards, but I got a diary soon after. Sometimes when we sit together in class, our fingers almost touch.
That summer, the air is filled with heat and excitement. Birds are nesting all over my body, flapping their eager wings when I think of her. Each time my old Nokia phone buzzes announcing an SMS, sparrows fly back to me carrying twigs of hope. Pigeons lift their bodies into the air, and fill me with anticipation. To make sense of their warbles and whistles, I turn to poetry. Around this time, I start reading Shakti Chattopadhyay, Joy Goswami, Bhaskar Chakraborty, Shankha Ghosh, and their modernist contemporaries. I want to know if they ever felt this way; this imprecise ebb and flow of the heart. Did they ever house these birds, feel the vastness of their flight expanding inside them?
To you only – 3
An aeroplane darts over your head—
standing afar, I watch
its gigantic shadow on your body— and birds
get scared even in 1971— really
we know so little about birds— even trees
are just as unknown— some trees make me wish
to stay with them forever— I want to sit
all afternoon among a thousand birds— really
all afternoon, I feel like doing so much more— when
you’re standing on the balcony
in a yellow saree
(Original title in Bangla – ‘Shudhumatro Tomake – 3’)
It is December, 2015. It has been a week since I’ve known – she loved someone else. I pretend not to care – that the world twists and spins and turns as usual, but deep down, I know that’s not true. Lately, all that’s left of the birds are ravens. Large and black, the corvids watch me with their queer, beady eyes all day. All that’s left of my heart is this ravenous inward gaze, mocking my fragile hopes, my puny dreams. I feel no rage at anyone else; I wish them a life tuned to their birdsong.
These days, I often reach the tuition classes late and sit someplace else. The sight of her briefly lifts something in my chest, sharply followed by an endless falling. I still solve problems faster than anyone else in my class, and then I leave. Outside, the world drops over me in flashes of red and blue. Pinpricks somewhere in me when I see them leaving together. I bend down to tie my shoelaces and hide my eyes— welling up without my approval. All the loudspeakers in the street play a popular Tollywood song that winter. The lyrics reverberate from the walls around me. Love – that strange, foreign word pervades the air with its whetted blade over and over again, an agonising refrain I can’t run from.
Where else could I go, but back to the poetry I had started reading that year? Only this time, my questions have changed, their amorphous innocence has taken a darker turn. On my bookshelf, only Bhaskar Chakraborty seemed to understand this tectonic shift, this tragic tumult. I find his gaze immersed in the ordinariness I have been thrust into. He tells me it’s okay to feel this way, to be thinking of one thing all day and not know what to do with my hands. Bhaskar holds them and says he sees them too — the ravens perched upon the trees, their eyes reflecting all the happiness down the streets: the carnival I can’t raise my hands and touch.
Galaxy
Everywhere, the evidence of love. Characters in stories and novels fall in love, and then they marry each other. There are so many clerks and officers in factories and offices, so many musicians and professors in music schools and colleges – love gleams in their faces, and ricochets off their spectacles, buttons, and rings. This is my haunting: I can’t lift my hands and touch my dreams. All day I’ve been thinking of you. In a little seaside town – feather footed, whose children have you been playing with today? Whose shirt are you tugging at, now in bed? I’ve enjoyed this summer vacation with my sweat and dirt. And now, on this winter night –B.T. Road blanketed with silence in the distance – I’m completely idle. I don’t sleep, I don’t write, I keep remembering our ancient mornings and afternoons…
I keep carrying an unworldly trophy for you, day and night.
(Original title in Bangla – ‘Chhayapoth’)
What was it that drew me to Bhaskar’s poetry? He isn’t known for the sense of rhythm and meter as Shakti Chattopadhyay, the linguistic sensuality of Binoy Majumdar, the boisterousness of Sunil Gangopadhyay, or any of his contemporaries. Instead, he crafts a world of his own – a world filled with the sweat and dirt, the simple anxieties of a common man. Bhaskar’s protagonist is plagued largely by feelings of insufficiency, he lacks the confidence to face his fears on his feet. Rather, he finds solace in his own mediocrity. In craving for “no alarms and no surprises”.
In the introduction to his Kobita Somogro (collection of poems), Bhaskar admits to how much he loves the mundane. Moved by the banal scenes from his life, he feels the need to record them in poetry. This imparts his poems with a tinge of fatigue, with melancholy. His gaze becomes hurt and soft, his hauntings suddenly my own, his abandonment just like mine.
But that isn’t all to Bhaskar’s poetry. I am moved by his ability to create simple but powerful images, and his use of space and punctuation to create meaning. He often uses the Em dash to separate segments, giving the reader a chance to pause and reflect on the image. Sometimes, a mere gap becomes a gasp – a volta that answers and elevates the poem. Here’s one of many examples:
To you only – 2
I like
your laughter – when
in the middle of the street
you laugh abruptly – even the policeman
turns to look at us
lights a cigarette.
(Original title in Bangla – ‘Shudhumatro Tomake – 2’)
Bhaskar presents two images for most of this short poem: the laughter in the middle of the street, followed by the policeman’s gaze. This is where the tension heightens to a peak, held carefully in the space between the final two lines, and then released with the wholesome final image. I find this gap to be brilliant – not only does it extend the tension for a moment longer, but by creating a separation between an antagonistic image and a blithe image, Bhaskar ‘arrives’ at the policeman’s reaction, thus making it more rewarding to the reader.
In even smaller space, Bhaskar works his magic:
Epitaph
Between two sighs, Death, I have seen you
coming alive
(Original title in Bangla – ‘Epitaph’)
Here, he juxtaposes death and life, and punctuates the gap between them with sighs. More than the juxtaposition itself (it’s interesting to see Death as a character performing the act of coming alive), once again, it’s the space that he creates – in words this time – with distinct images of sighs. Is the latter sigh more relieving, more reposing than the former?
It is September, 2019. I am recently twenty-one, walking in protest marches, writing stage plays, laughing with my entire body the way one laughs when they hold an ace of spades under their sleeve. I have loved and been loved a few times, and the past is an album of clouds melting into the sky.
I have a college friend who is a poet. Together, we take walks on some afternoons bunking classes, blow smoke rings from Gold Flakes over many cups of tea. When conch shells inaugurate the evening, he teaches me how to identify songbirds based on their call. We tell each other what we are trying to write. He speaks of his childhood in Krishnanagar, or the way he reads Tagore, Pranabendu Dasgupta, Utpalkumar Basu, Al Mahmud. I tell him what I’ve found reading Vikram Seth, Diane Seuss, Eunice de Souza. We exchange poems that move us, and sometimes our confabulations intersect at Bhaskar Chakraborty.
In our discussions, we arrive at an essential aspect of Bhaskar’s poetry – the ambience he creates. Often, his poems take us to a fuzzy room, where thoughts are abrupt and are connected with some kind of dream logic. Digging up some of his interviews, we are convinced that these strange juxtapositions are a conscious choice, that this is the formulation of his voice as a poet.
(excerpt) While Crossing
It’s 3pm now and the sunrays are getting weaker.
This summer will be troublesome and I will have to buy my daughter a colourful umbrella.
Wherever you come from, you must pass through the womb.
You are darkness’s flower. You are light’s confidante. Its very own.
(Original title in Bangla – ‘Periye Jete Jete’)
Bhaskar believes nothing in poetry is irrelevant. In his craft, he harnesses the power of the subconscious, and applies its haze to the poem’s structure. In his own words, he is miles away from logic. Rather he expects the reader to free themselves of expectation and take this leap with him. Manindra Gupta rightly calls Bhaskar’s poetry to be something between becoming and unbecoming, fog and predicament, sleep and wakefulness
(excerpt) Twenty-four years, I
so many are emptied of love even before loving— soundly
sleeping, so many hit the grave with their
spectacles still on— my window,
like sin, was open for twenty-four years,
for twenty-four years my greed had crept
under my fingernails like salt,
I no longer want to lie in bed
like a folded shoelace, like a lazy shadow
I no longer wish to be dissolved in bedsheets
I’ve woken up and fallen back asleep so often
before my whole body vanishes abruptly like camphor,
I want to leave the closet and watch you all day.
(Original title in Bangla – ‘Chobbish Bochhor, Ami’)
That Pujo, I run into the girl from my tuition class. Years have passed between us— we no longer speak, stare, or cry the same way. But when we meet in the noise and delirium of the Shyambazar five-way crossing, we smile our warmest smiles and decide to catch up over tea. Somehow, this feels perfectly normal. As if we were supposed to meet like this, a few years later in the bustle of our lives. We no longer laugh the same way. She tugs at my sleeve and dashes across a red light – giggling on the other side, relishing the shock on my face.
We find a tea shack and spill out the most exciting parts of our lives for each other. We talk about the lovers we have had since. She asks me if I still write poems like I did in high school. I tell her about my amateur theatre group in college, the roles I’ve played on stages of various kinds. At some point, I ask her if she still writes her dreams down each morning. She does not answer, but laughs a windchime laughter and turns her kohl-dark eyes away from mine.
Later, when we take a photo of ourselves, exchange numbers, and go our separate ways, I feel an ache shifting the sandbar in my chest. A low tide stretching the shore on a quiet afternoon. I stare at the photo we took, and then I close my eyes trying to imagine the song of a cuckoo – her favourite songbird from back then. But it’s 3pm and Shyambazar has long been emptied of birds. Only the blare of loudspeakers and stalled traffic hits my eardrums over and over again.
In the dream I saw
In the dream, I saw countless photos of yours floating, falling over my body. It’s been a while since I’ve dreamt. Longer still since I’ve seen you. Lying on my bed, I only understand that the days and the nights pass me by, and the sky crawls from shade to shade. The days I love have returned after a while. This time, I’ve found packets full of cigarettes and matchsticks. Found books and a bed I like. But what city was I sleeping in last night? Whose bedroom had I slept in? In the dream, I saw your photos falling and falling. In the dream, I saw your colourful sarees inching away from your photo – saw you lying beside me, chuckling to yourself.
(Original title in Bangla – ‘Swopne Dekhlam’)
It is March, 2020. Our belief in the continuity of life has just started to crack around the edges. A virus out there is claiming lives. There is panic in our neighbourhood. I’d like to believe it hasn’t reached my family yet, but I see fear muted in my father’s eyes on the eve of lockdown. In another week, the plight of migrant labourers across India would reach us, and then the virus, like a thin line of water, would slowly penetrate the concentric circles of our acquaintances, friends, and family.
Mayhem follows, and watching it unfurl makes me extremely aware of my privileges. Locked in my bedroom, I focus on my screen for hours, treading the world of mathematical puzzles to divert myself. It draws me into its abstract spiral, isolating me from the dystopia outside. The calendar in my room wafts with the occasional breeze, filled with irony. Mynas and martins have started returning to our backyard. As weeks roll into months, I start to question who I am inside the bubble of my privilege. I stop calling my friends when all they have is anxiety and bad news. My phone is switched off for days at a time. Grappling with existential dread, a global pandemic, and intense loneliness, I can feel the weight of the world. My deepest desire is to forget what I’m experiencing and dissipate into the past. I want to return to a landscape I can still recognise in my mind. As if I was never really here, not more than a brief, ephemeral moment.
Poem for this century
O sweet, little people
of the twenty-first century,
please do forget
about us. We were
sickly and selfish.
We were brutal and
pensive. We lived
when nuclear ash
blew all over the blue—
when the cities kept waiting
to come crashing down.
(Original title in Bangla – ‘Ei Shotabdir Kobita’)
It is April, 2022. I am at the end of my master’s degree, and everything in my life is pointing towards an epilogue. My friend, the poet from college graduated during the pandemic and left for the United States. As has been the norm for the last couple of years, we never had a formal goodbye. Only wishes woven wordlessly into the air, like paper lanterns cast into the night.
These days, I laugh like a man who riddles himself with endings, who finds himself emptied of cards in the middle of a game. A man who has lived half a life in a couple of years, seen the world crumble from the pandemic, watched loved ones die from the dearth of hospital beds. I am cracked with the weight of absence. I am struggling with my own choices, striving to find anything I’m good at. When I read poetry, I am often looking at how the poet endures their own turbulence. As the guava tree outside my hostel room fills up with flowers, one day I find myself immersed in nostalgia. I love all that is tinged with the sepia of my past.
And in this bittersweet haze, I feel more drawn to Bhaskar’s prose poems for their lyrical appeal. Something about the absence of line breaks makes them dearer to me, like driving on a highway and approaching someplace beautiful. When Bhaskar records his middle-class life in a long-gone Kolkata, he imbues the poems with his sorrows and his chasms, and reading them decades later – I realise he’s speaking to me.
Nocturnal
When the lights go out next door on the second floor, we realise, it’s late. And millions of constellations are stunned next to each other. And lying under a massive sky we dream that we are happy. Our children are happy. Their children ask women for this and that. It is foolishness that we keep saving for our entire lives. At winter’s cusp, the moon approaches us through the barren branches. We shift further towards sleep. We write of love; we scribble of our suffering in our notebooks. ‘Hey, I’m not going to return’ – what I had said last year, wasn’t really true. There they are, my sweaty vests and shirts. And here I am, only falling asleep in the wind. Slumbering again. In my sleep – I hear the sad nocturnal songs of old spinsters floating to me from distant balconies.
(Original title in Bangla – ‘Ratrikaleen’)
Bhaskar, I write to you from the century after yours. I write to you as someone who spent his childhood and years of his youth striving to be different, to carve out his own niche, to make a dent in the hard, hard armour of the world. Someone who thought his ambition was a rocket shooting into the hollow gulp of space. I am writing to you because, at a point in time, I finally epiphanised how ordinary I am. I realised I’ve been dealt the same tricks as almost anyone else, that my fragile talents are ubiquitous, that I’m no more a flap-wing than a domestic sparrow.
Reading you, Bhaskar, I learnt foremost to love this ordinariness, to accept my banality for what it is. I’ve always been laughing and crying as those around me, just as anyone else grappling with the adversities of their own life. I’ve loved, lost, and received just as much. And it’s okay to move forward without scaling the mountain of our expectations. We get to feel beautiful by accepting that we are ordinary – the way each star is an ordinary speck in the cobalt darkness. And it’s okay to just be our flinching, flickering selves because even if we cannot have all the things we dreamed of, we still have our dreams.
And underneath that same sky as yours, Bhaskar, I am happy. I have found abstract puzzles to stimulate my brain with. I have found poems I want to write. Lying on my back some afternoons, I watch hundreds of birds find their way back home. It is only October 2024 – and I keep learning to move forward, still.
All translations by the author.
Debmalya Bandyopadhyay is a writer and mathematician based in Birmingham, UK. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ghost City Review, Rust & Moth, Couplet Poetry, Ballast, The Dodge, and Anthropocene Poetry, among other literary journals. His poetry has been anthologised in the Propel Anthology and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English – 2023. He has been nominated for Best of the Net and was a finalist for SweetLit’s 2024 Poetry Prize. When not reading or wracking his brain on mathematical puzzles, he can sometimes be found in parks confabulating with local birds. Read more from Debmalya on this blog, here.
