my world my writings

I have asked myself this question everytime I felt dejected… why do I write?

This question comes in many guises. When I feel the immense strain and stress of writing, when I find that writing has given me a lot of pain, made me stay away from the simple and easy pleasures of life like watching TV for hours or going on a shopping spree … whenever I feel that for a piece of writing I have been harassed or criticized…I ask myself this question. The answer, my friend is blown in the wind. I got everything from my writing. I got myself. 

But to get yourself back in writing, you must first loose yourself first in the world.

And that is why the connection is important between my world and my writing.

What is my world? How is my world?

In one way my world is what takes me away from writing. What snatches me out of my reveries, pulls me down from my ivory tower. Whenever I am embroiled in the day to day activities, in my quest for earning the daily bread, and do not come back to the act of writing for days on end.

But then I feel a gnawing pain growing inside me.  A sense of unrest, unease, starts building up, and it gathers momentum. Gathers pressure. Then like a pressur cooker whistle, my self tries to erupt into a scream.

That becomes my poetry.

Everytime I forget my writing , I have to come back to it in tears, in utter depression. Whenever I stay away from it, I feel so claustrophobic , so wound up, dejected, that I have to come back  to it.

My world has always given me a lot . but it has also given me a lot of gaps to fill, lot of absenses which became a boon actually. An acute loneliness in childhood, losing my father at a tender age, all this accumulated to my sense of void. Which I had to fill up with my writing.

I grew up in a typical Calcutta urban middle class  household, with nothing much to do apart from my studies… a Bangla medium middle class school, which taught a good dose of literature, specially writings of Rabindranath Tagore et al. I had not many friends, did not have games to play , wasn’t the sporty type. A lonesome , shy young girl who could only pour her heart out in her diary pages. I was unable to communicate myself through any other means.

My poetry started there, on those hidden pages, not meant to be shared with anyone.  The journey which started from those diaries, and ended in the magazines read by millions, was long. But it seems everything happens by some providence.

I could never feel at home without penning down my thoughts then. As I already told you, and even now, some days pass by when I do not write a thing, after a few such barren days, I feel suffocated, restless , and  full of unease.

In the meanwhile so many things happened to me…from a lonely childhood I have gained a society full of friends, relatives, work colleagues. And in a crowded situation I still feel alone.

In our lifetime, on the other hand, we have seen a lot of transformations. In a way my generation stood on a threshold. I have seen feminism pass us by,  I have seen the objectification of women like never before growing with the sense and desire  liberation of women like never before. as a woman I had to address these issues.

In the meanwhile, in the beginning of my writing career, Indian  society underwent transformation with the times… 90s was the era of deregulation, globalization and  free market. The public life changed and so did the personal.. each one of us was affected even if in a small way. Human relationships changed because of  the economic and political compulsions. This phenomenon fascinates me. Such happenings always cast their shadow on me… and make me scribble  a few lines  here and there.

On a second thought,writing poetry was a subversion for me. I have never written anything without being perturbed by something. I am not a typical anti establishment poet, but somehow through recounting my life and times I have registered a version, an interpretation wholly mine.. a protest..

So , in a way, my world has always been my source of inspiration, even in the guise of an enemy.

I have been embroiled in my world, sometimes lonesomely, sometimes in a crowd, and always tried to derive my own absolute freedom from its various shackles. That , i think consists of most of this world’s writing acts. Trying to unshackle oneself from the immediate situation. A flight of fancy.

I personally feel constructing a poem is like waging a war, throw back something on life itself. It is also pacifying, therapeutic. Sudden urges or contemplated emotions… all get covered by poetry… and calms me down, prepares me for more contemplation, more living…

the virago ( translation by poet)

The virago

She had slept on her mat.  The untouchable mat.

No I shall not sleep on it, on this black  mat

On this untouchable mat.

this torn, longlasting, loneliness-born

Heat emitting and weak mat.

My mat ought to be white white white

Satisfying

There you go! Your mat , bone-white

There you go! Your mat, chalk- white

There you go! Your mat, spotless, squarish, straight.

Are you happy now? Imagination? Or would you wake up in the dead of night

And shouting , shake up the sleeping night… “Where is the white mat?”

The virago will sleep with so much pleasure on her  ever-dark mat!

the window ( translation poet and Shri Nityapriya Ghosh)

The window that I have kept open
is filled with love, with dreams, with moonlight
you are my unhappy childhood, my undisclosed fears
my voice tuned with care
I lovingly place you within my eyesight,
within my anger.
O love, I shall place you between my breasts
as if you were the tiny bundle of money
kept by the beggar
I shall wear you as if
you were a gilded chain
held together by a safety pin.

the window which I have kept open
shows a lonely sky
I cough, stuck with phlegm
because the window lets in cold air.

the biting cold air which penetrates the thick canvas
O love! keep me awake with a death wish.

for I have been laid low by a man
eighteen years older than me
I have been kept awake by caresses
of another man who does not exist.

like twin brothers, love splashes
and wets my insides.

O love, do not make me forget myself
for I wish to stay wide awake.

for the death wish of which I spoke to you
was just a manner of saying.

let them go on raping me.
they will find nothing.
they kept on thrashing me
I have been torn apart
like  a loose hemline
of the canvas yashmak
impossible to repair.

I feel no more
I care no more if they drag me
 along the road
I care no more if they
wring me as if I were a wet towel.

O love, I have laid out my wailings
like my loosened hair, I spread them out
on the very window through which I let you come.

when the sun rises high and scorches
I sweat inside my yashmak.

Now I can hear my unhappy childhood, my tuned in voice.

Death and Love, drown down everything.

Simantini wanted to be a model ( translation poet's own)

Simantini wanted to be a model

Simantini wanted to be a model

Simantini could not be a model.

Near Fuleswar Station

Simantini’s hair is caught in the train line.

Her scarf caught, Simantini in the train wrote

Lines after lines

In her black notebook

 copied down the  ramp, star, and brightness

The notebook that the police is looking for.

It’s found at the Ma Sati Saloon.

Simantini’s  hair, nails, lips, eyelashes

Are scattered

In Liluah, Sodepur and Naihati Junction

Simantini wanted to be a model

Simantini could not be a model.

Drumbeat footlight flying kisses

Simantini had asked for. Now

In a sky beyond the sky

Flowers flourish through her torn dress in Fuleswar

Simantini becomes a matinee idol

Simantini becomes Matangini, Sati.

Matangini and Sati: In Hindu legend,  Sati is one incarnation of Shakti or the female supreme power. She gave up her life to uphold her husband’s honour. Knowing this her husband Shiva took her body on his shoulder and did a destructive tandava dance , which scattered her body parts all over India creating 52 peethas or places of devotion.

Matangini is also a form of Shakti.

Thingamabob ( Translation Trinanjan Chakrabarty)

 Preface

The structure unveils

The meaning of things

Things   black skin white skin

We       do not set apart

The structure       does

From Bangladesh to Nicaragua

Things are handled

By women

With kid gloves

And we understand

The great role things play

In the history of mankind

The things matter in this power-play

          

  

  Table Lamp

The bubble of radiance

a verse inscribed  on the brown   shade

Enlightened within

And outwardly   brilliant

blasé

Almost a genius

Under the light

The slumber lays the groundwork

Dropped off books and grimy cassettes

Show-cards   sonata    dozing off

Beside a shellfish idol and a shiny stapler

A crisp spider web and a wilted flower

A conch shell lamp-holder from seashore

And a photograph

Incredibly effulgent

The things become    in the evening

At the glow of the table lamp

Pervasively polished    painless     impersonal

The witless lamp-stand overlooks

All the intimate moments

Still, inside its stomach burns a filament

M shaped … Red

 Table

There are tables.

Of all sorts.

Of which the writing desk has gone out of circulation.

I spared not a single effort to get one writing desk.

The writing desk is a real achievement.

First, you have to decide the perfect height

The second thing is the width

Next, how to get it cramped with things

And at last, the writing itself. Left to destiny.

Once you’re all set before your very own and loved writing desk

 You feel almost like singing Tagore

 “I walked down the never-ending way to reach thy door step…”

Elsewhere, the tables are dwarfish

Naïve and innocent

Almost flirty with their

Ashtray

Water

Aspirin

 Type writer

Remington’s shaggy red hair and blue eyes

He loved so much toying with tools

And His business, beside the window, writing crumbs of his own life

Starved … shamed

Proust was pallid sickly

His delicate and bourgeois bed

When he woke up, his body had melted into the time lost

With his senses shattered

His insomnious eyes dangling in the mirror

The solitary Tennessee Williams in the scorching midday

Swarm of flies … tired  melancholic  sexcited

Plump hausfrau… rapt in his tales… type writer rattling

Green curtain door… the day wrapped in the duck

The tool crammed with visuals dawdles in the room corner

 The poet failaureate and successful professor

Made his chemistry theses when he was young

Now junk… idle...

Crumbled pages of the time-worn novel

  

Al-Zolam

Emile Zola, Meer Zumla, Al-Zolam

The three friends sit beside my bed

Attend on my sleep      by turns

Walk in my dreams and start swinging

Trade-off of attires   their usual favourite play

In the dream-forest of my night savage

The python creeps, the tiger crawls

The three musketeers all set       to guard the sleep

Shield the mind from horrors

And increasingly, I cling to them

From point two-five to point five

The revolvers get closer to me

Till point blank range.

Even awake, I can hear them

Accosting me

Emile Zola, Meer Zumla, Al-Zolam

My three playmates. 

Featherpillow

This world of feathers. On the notches of pillows

The finger accosts you, uncanny

Sensations slide down to the ventral region

From the peritoneum; it’s your destiny.

So unsuspecting the faces around, how will you know

Your blindness hatches the lonesome night

Your holes loaded up with water

Your hard-sought fruits eaten up by beasts

No other left over than a love-hungry man

He is lying on the bed and fondles all day long

His breast and his own neck with the plume 

the girl from the video game ( translation Sivaji Banerjee)

I am a Japanese doll, beeswax smooth, top to toe

I am 3D, rotate yourself while staring.
My following is a function of time.
A rare habit you may say.

Fluidity hugs my thin sharp lips
I enter your heart in the speed of mind.
My exit is a pierce-through,

resting on your exhaustion.
Only a hole remains
And the obnoxious smell of charred flesh.

 I am a mere stupid doll
 Oh no, a perplexed cartoon.
 Like a bubble, I traverse lightly
 Full blossomed  and eyes shut wide.
 Dew faced, but in smart terror
 My body exuberates a  rubbery sexiness.
 Every time, with  lesser effort.
 I am programmed so!

I arrive dressed stellar at your screen step
  Play with your triviality, nurture it a lot
  Or at times, pin the balloon in you to a rubbery pulp
  I am seduction-happy, a strength to surrender by
   lightly arrived wind blowing though the bamboo chime,

Or  floating cherry blossoms

Extremely perturbed I am, in utter disgrace
  I deface every petal but in hatred.

You bring
  Your troubles
  To kill my soul.
  The game discharges the battery cell.
  Countdown begins.
  In a final attempt,

You speed up the game
  And so does the score.

Depressed I am, but the killer speed
  Shows my mind, how worn it is.

Translation by Shivaji Banerjee

Poetry Poem ( Translation Aryanil Mukherjee)

Words are a pain! I attempted to return to them

and failed. Latched on to their buoyed selves

like an exhausted doe. Lily leaves

mossed sluggish.

I love words. Their lives. And returned to them

with an extended wet darkness of nowhere

with a love gone putrid

Decay slipping off from this palm

Death and fear rearranged on the

other

What dawn is a word ! My love for the afternoon

misguide me into this morning – one that keeps peeling

to reveal the onion’s repulsive heart.

Translated from Bengali by Aryanil Mukherjee

Lub-Dub : Translation by Nirupam Chakraborti

Lub-dub: from the book of melancholic verses

I

And that’s your neighborhood, see full of lots of fun

That’s your own space, go hit a petty jackpot

Inside your head see, neurons piled layers and layers

And your thoughts see : streaks so pure, white and grey

Why do you choke then ? Suffocate, as if to death!

You  hide, you lurk as if to catch a prey

Long time no luck, you skulk, can’t miss them all, no way!

It’s spring in your neighborhood; it’s all fiesta and fun

It’s loud rock n’ roll, it’s just pandemonium

The land feeds all, go help yourself, here anything and everything go

It’s neat like a clogged drain, that’s how the emotions flow

Sticky like buttered rice, so are the gossips low

Like red hot chili pepper, that’s how it is, you know.

II

In this state you are just calm and immobile. Detached, as if in a long slumber.

Then some miracle swirls around you, and you wake up startled

As if you are a fish, out of water, gasping for breath on a muddy river bank

As if there’s a crazy wind, rushing through a channel surrounding you

As if there’s a strange noise and gone is the gooey mess around you

Free you are:  as if a carcass saturates with blue venom 

The venom of an exciting awakening.

As if a bitter blizzard from the wintry north now opens the pages of your book of melancholic verses

As if its dry pages fly, your wounded fingers soaked in blood and puss -- as if they tend to move

As if in a desolate library the tables turn, the chairs shift, all on their own

Your brassiere flies away, as if never to return.

In your stale world of darkness now it’s the time of a huge tide

Now the waves rise, breaking the barrage, shattering the windowpanes

And from now on, all your neurons, your soul and heart, all saying lub-dub in unison

As if from now on you are alive and also wide awake.

the republic of females ( a few translations by the poet)

Life in the water 

 1.
This game takes place under the sea.
Life in life, water in water.
And one does not know how to tell
 loyalty from treachery,
 Or love from the act of multiplying.

2.
 Fattery , tenderness, hanging around
near the loved one
circling the friend in magical dance-acts,
 coquettish allures and poses
 these are not particularly humane
everything began long time back
in the vast expanse of the world of living things.
 I understand this,
struck by the stances of love dance
 Performed by the sea horse couple

 3.
There is a shark named Carpet Shark
 With a spotty body in golden, brown,
black and white
 The way he behaves with his darling,
 the way he holds her by the throat
 Is familiar.
 Could love be better this way ?

 4.
 In the world of beings,
 our birth has been in the water
 In the beginning
Just as the starfish lives,
 the jellyfish lives,
 the seahorse, the shark

 the ova hang by the gelatinous sacks
from the plants under the sea

And we remember our fetus birth,
oceanous, floating, coiled up, primitive


 The glass paperweight 

 In the lonely room, the woman’s hand moves, seeking pleasure.
 The glass sphere was on the table:
 she takes it up and feels it.
 Something so heavy, round and smooth can be so good.
 Comforting, too.
She feels lonely.
She feels hungry.
A pincushion or a spice-box, or anything longish, smooth
 She has tried to derive
from these earlier,
 but how long one can stick to
 Just a shape?
 The truth, the ultimate is not in the shape.
 Then one could have done with the real thing.
 The real thing does not suffice.
So in the lonely room, all day long
The hand searches for a comforting, alternative thing.

And at last the glass sphere is found.
 Dotted in colors inside.
Inside : extremely good.
Heavy, round, smooth, seamless - so good.
And the woman starts living for the ultimate pleasure, again.


 In the darkness

 Who do you live with, in the darkness, you selfish, lonely girl ?
Which face do you seek , burning a teeny light, in the darkness?
 Burning the smallest candle, who is it you make love with
 Under the pillow : scribble scribble : what do you hide?

 In the darkness, you shift the pillow
and put your hand, your pen Just in the right place,
 and keep it there, touching the letters, don’t move
 Once you take it off, you will forget the start and the finish
 All the lines will jumble up :
well , I was never in line!

In the darkness , at your side,
the one who is sleeping is Buddha, Shiva and Jesus
Still you are a wench … you are irreligious, hungry, a fallen girl
You take pleasure in yourself, your pen shivers, you take pleasure alone,
 and keep your partner in the dark
 Oh  GOd,  please forgive all my sins,
 this dangerous passion of writing poetry

In the darkness, in a stealthy notebook ….
 Sh..sh..sh..my sweetheart is sleeping by my side!

The Wombspeak

 Nobody knows how I clogged myself up
 Like those redtaped files of the mean guys
 In the offices

 This darkness shaped like a pot,
and this pot steeped in darkness
About it everything was pinned and stapled
 those “notings” torn, what was inside has come out into the open
And now I speak of myself
In gushes
now I vomit
All the unborn fetuses of your children…


 2
a sob has knotted up in my throat
and you call that sob ‘blood’
all the pipes, black pipes are screwed up in rage
 and you thought that is a flow problem
if you touch me there will be a sluicing
 you can hardly manage
 as much cotton wool you stuff in here
as much rags you keep on stuffing
you cannot stop the scream

 3
 I am only a womb.
I leave this mark
Behind.
 Abandon all other identities.
 my blood now trickles down in this world of dust
 I have seen the blood of the queen.
All other visions are in vain.
 All other achievements Become dust unto dust …
my brains, my thoughts
 All my stories are held now in this womb-like lore
All the women are now held on this string
 One womb holds hands with another womb.

my womb now competes with my granny’s ,
 and loses my womb now asks for a conception
as a loan from my mom’s
my womb is now pledging to all successful wombs
my education, erudition and everything I treasured.

 Each lost embryo, each abortion
 slowly turns me into a repenting womb.

 4

 one womb had conceived eight times
 and all eight times , they said it was a "successful delivery"
 the other womb, only once.

 First womb (1901-1999), that of the granny
Second womb (1965- ) that of the granddaughter .
Now, on the tenth and eleventh days of every month
 The second womb weeps for her
 Unborn children.

 Now, after every  wilful termination and unplanned abortion,
The second womb is
 Dejected
 Tired
Anemic.