matter-of-factly

and hence I stopped worrying and fell for un-worded poems-

2012-02-13T22:27:00.000-08:00

1.
for
what are words
to a poem
just an ill fit garb,
my poems flow
with the sounds of unknown,
they tap the boundaries
of a folklore

and sometimes
it is not even the magic of a page
the staccato of the ink
or even the canvas of a rhythm
that gives life to my verse.

just a cup of coffee
and your name
in the middle of a page
handwritten
by me.

2..
my wordless poems
are filled into
the beauty of a sunlit winter morning,
and the notes of a
passionate torrential downpour,

my poems are nothing
but the rendition
of your slow soothing voice
that talks to me when am writing.

my poems are everything
but words.
they are
bone and flesh
snow and ice
and a little of you.

and love, it is
in the twilight realm
of your eyes
and in the chateaus of morning
on your face
where lies
the sand laden beauty of the pyramids,
old dense foliage of machu-pichu,
the snow-filled peace of the alps,
white calm night moon of Taj Mahal
the comfort of a poem
that shall be written
and all that goes
by the name of me

some time this time-

2012-02-13T22:26:00.000-08:00

And for time just walks
diligent, unrepentent
tick tock

it is only the man who stops
in a certain alleyway
of a moment
from where
it is impossible to go back
and worthless to go ahead.

...

like I do somewhere in the classroom
of Prescidency,
watching you stealthily
reading, Marquez
while I fall for you, like time
over and over again
and again
and again
etc

they say am a time that has stopped
but I am just a moment, eternal.

footsteps and hands-

2012-02-13T22:25:00.000-08:00

I walk with your shadows
like a footstep
to the country of memories
where the senses lose their meaning
and ideas are farce
where I feel more than I see
where silences hold the conversation
and your eyes murmurs an ocean
.
and I drown

all while your voice mimes
a soft breeze
and the comfort of a well slept night
where nothing remains as it were
and words are just a pretext.
to a more subtler dialogue
that proceeds by touch

and then the facade of the world
calls me back for its daily rigmaroles
but even when you are not around
you remain, like a sky
that shelters the slow rhythm of
my poetry

and your thoughts paint my words
as my soul bathes in the light of
your poem

for I am just a hand
that scribbles of whatever
you have asked me to

in fragments yet conjoined (like love)

2012-02-08T01:02:00.001-08:00

1
I exist
a part flesh and a part thought
like the shadows of intangible
the warmth of a starless rain smelling night
the chants of an old ruined shrine
and a thousand living moments
nested in the comfort of your arms.

2
You know,
there is an unknown sky
inside the home of your eyes
that makes a thousand ships to sail
through the ocean of my heart
and the water stays
in the imprints of your small palms
in ripples

3
As I
let go of me
and my solitary confinement of a life
only to fall back
once more
in the enamoring arms
of a metaphor
in the archipelago of your skin
out beyond every failure of mine
and the need of a poetry
to find you, in me

4
And then I learn
that I was never meant to meet you
that all along
we resided within us
breathing in each other
for each other
like the unsuspected light of sun
deep within the sacred soul of the moon

.
0
Walk by to see
how each prose of mine
is pronounced a poem,
in solitude
and a story
in unison
just by -
the touch of your name.

Year Book

2012-01-25T21:27:00.000-08:00

-'Diary'
Sayantan Roy
115, Welbourne Street

25/4
I have looked at this photograph
Twenty two times in thirty one minutes
Your face and then back to his
Your childish wide grin
his unbearable good looks
Your body tilted towards him,
face out of focus yet facing the lens

29/4
I saw you in that photograph with Adam
You looked blissful like Aparna Sen
in the Monsoon girl pic
And all your friends and everybody was there
and you sat in a circle with all
yet you two look cut out of it

2/5
I wonder how happy does he make you
To be truthful I have red eyes
But I guess am just tired

9/5
The emotion that yearns for you
never sinks in,
it floats

like my limpid verse
staggering to a hault
in the whirlwind of a heartache

2/6
So do his fingers run through your hair?
they must
and has he yet noticed
the still perspiration dabs around your neck
or your love for all things bronze
and hard cover
that sometimes you eat a lot of cheese
just for the heck of it
that you sketch beautiful but haunted women
in the last pages of your notebook
that you taste like an alphonso
and kiss like an adolescent
your voice is the mirror to your mind
that you have the tiniest set of feet and palms
never did you read, that one Tolstoy
your eyebrows have a life of their own
that Colombian coffee beans, exists
that you are all my poetries
that you are just you
and something more

5/7
In the slow embers and patina of mists
everything shall hide itself out
and all my thoughts of you
shall die a slow desirable euthanasia
I shall again write meaningful poems
with no undercurrents
and that never more
shall you find me absent minded
moving my right feet back and forth
and quoting out of breath
and writing

etc.. etc.. etc..

.

2012-01-21T12:26:00.000-08:00

the sky stares like an empty canvass
waiting for your palms to fill them
with colors and lights
and in this drawingboard of a moment
I form prose that melt softly
into the fish shape of your eyes
midst the river song of my words

but mostly.
in my memories of you
there lies
just a moment
of a hazy winter morning
where words fall
with a synchronous thud
and an orphaned dotted sky

on which sometimes
a strangely silent Trochilidae flies by
in the distant horizon

and then,
my verse of a moment dances
words drip as if tropical rains in Amazon
metaphors breeze by like Savanna winds
and
like the temple lit holy evenings
of an iridescent Varanasi
in an oft used palette, a poem is conceived
that has you name, your eyes
and you standing by me.

.
in my memories of you
there lies a moment
of a hazy winter morning
where you stay besides me
drawing ripples on the waters of Ganges,
on the moment,
and on me.

‎39, Presidency University-

2012-01-20T00:12:00.001-08:00

1
He sleep-walks around Lyon sometimes on evenings
sometimes taking photographs
mostly like a well groomed nomad
he strums words on pages
relatively pretentious
and overwhelmingly unambitious.
He writes because he still lives
It is not sad, dull, gory, happy
it just is
And he writes

Sayantan, Untitled-
(a)And what if we have a daughter.
How would she grow upto be.
I believe she would have your eyes and my eye brows.
Like the things you are, mostly
with a gray hue of me.

...That day just outside that small coffee-hut
I saw this young french brunette girl thirteen.

She took twelve seconds to cross the street, exactly that
because I saw her reflection on my watch
for the first time, as I saw her.
Exactly like you
I usually would be inside the bookstore
across the road by then
but you would measure and walk.
Just like her
this unknown French kid...

(b)And I think about the three of us
looking curiously outside the windows
on a rainy afternoon
with the falling waters
making strange patterns
on its transparent doors
I would be assured of her intelligence
if we could gaze on like this.

Moreover your eyes can scan poetry can't they
even in the most dilapidated of foundations
and what is rains-
but uncovering the raw beauty
that this old-old planet holds.
You've taught me that
ah! she would just know.

(c)and when she gets a boyfriend
would she look for me in him
or a man-ed version of you
who is much well read, unchaotic
and basically better.

She would be eager to read the books
I have read
because you always are aren't you.
You read Tolstoy
could you finally complete Karenina.

And once more my life would reek of Blyton's,
Carroll's and likes.

End-
To live in this unreal panorama of a real life
he has wizened out his soul.
Lucid mornings,
clearer yet snowy noons and a lot of meanderings
is what it takes.

Inside he still reads Neruda to let him sleep.
And resides in the Baker Street apartment
with the master and the friend
and the Hounds of Baskervilles to just think of her and yet not.
And sometimes just sometimes
by sheer personal absent mindedness
puts up his address as
-39, Presidency University
Pyari Sarkar Street, Bow Bazaa

If on a winter’s night a traveler - I be-

2012-01-08T04:23:00.000-08:00

*Pre Script*-

As I write tonight I see a lamp shade a writing table and a ceiling
I see the materials that define me and I want to rebel
I want to stand against the non-living
I want to forget conventions and rules
I want to free myself

I see Jarsmusch laughing along a camera
Berolt Brecht creating a play inside another
and Calvino saying come lets puzzle words and ways

*Tanima*-

If Sayantan would ever remove his minus two spectacles
and just look at my eyes while talking of Neruda
If he would ask me about Bolivian diaries
If he would perhaps deepen his voice
and call my name with the'a' sounding as 'o'
If he would ever talk to me
like he talks to the nine year old Nando from the tea stall
If he would ever tease me on my small nose
If he would ever graze me by and smile

I would tell him
that it’s not just Socialism or Caucasian Chalk Circle
connecting us
its love too.
If he would..

*Me*-

Sayantan meanders through my story
as floating leaf on a slow summer water bed.

He has no identity

Hardly a name

And a faint scent of life.

Yet he gives meaning to Tanima and all paraphernalia’s.

Tanima shall grow in my story
the woman who shall render to all your poetic fetishes

she will be your Bonolata Sen

or Helen of troy

or Nefertiti

or Labanya

as you wish.

As of now
she is a character in all of Sayantan's verses.
Sayantan is..
Sayantan is Calvino's traveler

*Sayantan*-

If I look at her while reciting 'If you forget me'
I shall never forget her
If ever I ask her of Guevara
I would be lost in her idealism
If I pronounce her name in bangla
she would remind me too much of Maa
If I ever touch her
I shall not let her go
When she gets to know that my smiles at Nando
are when I want her to see me
She shall probably love me

And then I know
like Brechtian's characters
we shall grow in love more than ourselves

*Poem*-

I am a passing moment
or a piece of
a broken memory
left on the wayside
and there is no sound
just a chance morning shower
like the day is yet to be
and the night is too afraid of the dark

am a candid emotion

I just put words besides each other
and decorate them
making void a beauty
I foreplay verses
going round about the same circle
I create nothingness
in my hollows am a genius

And I do not idolize standards
disfiguring reality
I paint
an essential life

Come with me
and we shall be lost
and forgotten
and happy

*Sketches*-

Sayantan walks back and forth along his home at Ekdalia Street
The brewing breeze shall make it rain
and every drop shall make a sound on his heart
He needs to be loved tonight

Now,
He is a nomad jostling through his and Tanima's life

He is a seminal thought in my mind
and a perceptible reality in Tanima's

He is a sketch of all my impossibilities

He is my grown up Holden Caulfield

He is the boy next door
and yet a Shakespearean tragedy

He is my peeping tom to the world

And even after all that love he has for Tanima
we know he shall just take it slowly

Thus there's no reason in it,
it just is

Crossroads-

2011-12-30T06:16:00.000-08:00

1
That morning in his empty studio apartment
He had left a diary open with a few scribbled lines
No one knows if it was Faiz or him
He had a bad handwriting
He desired penning a book
He had recently fell in love with this too beautiful a woman
He never told anybody the full details
He was saving money recently
He was suddenly talking of monogamy and the values in society
He was reading Neruda and "Canto General" a lot these days
He wrote sad poems that lingered around
He wanted to see Liverpool win the championship again
He wanted to buy a taat'er sari for Nando'r Maa
He once had critically evaluated Garcia's
"Chronicles of a death foretold" for Vidya's literary pleasures
He sang Imagine like a bad copy of Lennon
He always read the Telegraph before he slept at nights
(That day he could not)

2
Ma said, there was no sun the whole day
Or her eyes were blurred all the time
Memory of that day get mixed up for her
She remembers though that she kept on looking at the door all day long,
I don't know why

When he was in school she had taught him to cross the roads
Look left and look right and look left again
He was an obedient kid
The night before the incidence he called Maa up
and before hanging up he told her that he missed her

3
Arghya was somewhere in Srinagar for a photographic sojourn then
Ratan wanted him to proof read his article
Shikha promised him a Brownie the next time they met
Abani still had his 'Nine Stories' unreturned
Jamini never believed that this shall be the fate
She still has his phone number saved
Biman and he took a life insurance policy just a month back
He had a plan to go to NYC with Shrijeeb that spring

4
He was there to leave Arghya at the railway station
Shoulders hanging, boyish grin and still making jokes
They laughed on the Monty Python that day
And before leaving he said, "Good bye Jeeves"
The moment that it happened
Arghya had just taken photograph
of a setting evening sun
And even after a year has gone by, Nilotpal still feels guilty
Just a few hours before the incidence he had told him
"You'll live till hundred. As I was just thinking of you."
But it was Veena that he was to meet that afternoon
And only she has all his nineteen poems intact
And she shall

Reuters-
Two people died in different road rage cases around Calcutta

something idyllic

2011-12-30T06:15:00.000-08:00

There are evenings
hidden in the closet of memories
a fragrant smell of the
faint dry winters
and incense stick
and of prayers
with whispering voice of grandmother

Of memories at home
of childhoods
refusing to let go

And then there are you
walking by me like a moment unadorned
like a night
moonless
of a thousand fireflies

where I sit by the river
calm yet enchanted
and you
.. you walk and draw a ripple in the silent night waters
becoming a quaint white shadow
of me
and sometimes
my home

Making Love-

2011-12-30T06:11:00.001-08:00

And as the night slowly fades by
like the slow burning amber
fluorescent and yet dying

I dream it to be
something like this night.
When I shall be held
by the moonlit shadows
of your face
with my moans slowly burning
on the wax of your lips.

And there is a voice
perhaps it's yours
perhaps my soul
calling our names together
as the curve of our skins
smudge into each other
and what is left
is a dripping rain of passions.

There will be no one
but the darkness
and a slow fading moon
which is privy to
what you and I have become
as whatever is left
of the ocean of our bodies
are a few salt lakes
scattered all over

Am nothing
but your wounds inflicted on me
am a kiss brushed in your sighs
am our love
and am ecstasy.

And with every warm breath
you exhale, fueling the light
of our shared pleasures
O love, you fuse life unto me.

There are better writes out there-

2011-12-30T06:09:00.000-08:00

Somedays I do not desire to be cryptic
Somedays I just want to elaborate myself
in broken sentence
incomplete ideas

For example,
explaining how your voice is to me

like uninvited rains
like hard bound covers
like quality literature
like 'The Double Life of Veronique'
like Surrealism
like Liverpool with Premier league, someday
like Miguel Najdorf's style
like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight
like college street book shops
like a cashmere shawl in winters
like jaggery sondesh
like childhood memories
like world peace
like John Lennon's Imagine

And yet I find me incapable

like a slow drizzle
like dry leather
like Kafakaesque fiction
like Ray's Nayok
like escapism
like Liverpool dropping to number 7
like Boris Spassky
like A Woman called Golda
like Calcutta crowd
like minus three
like calories
like grown up failures
like Nuclear threats
like Mark David Chapman

I wish I could
write my feelings better

The other one-

2011-12-30T06:08:00.000-08:00

1
Succharita still has those dreams
of things that never did happen
where she ran out of the wedding
never to be seen again
and she finds herself alone
standing somewhere near writers building
and it’s raining like it never did

And all while Rajeeb the guy that she did marry
sleeps next to her holding her hand
like a baby who needs continuous assurances
that she is there
and she always holds him
to assure she is
but sometimes only she knows
she is not

Life is so much about so many things these days
the Morning Darjeeling tea
Rajeeb and her offices
their occasional dinners
his special renditions of Paz
her making sure that Rajeeb gets
the correct proportioned maach fried
the way they occasionaly make love
Rajeeb's clumsy kisses those sometimes are cute
and a shared sense of destiny

2
They were the heady days of University
The days of the common Janta Party
Of Siddarth Shankar Ray's terror
Of Canning and Morichjhapi
Of dreams of utopia
the student revolutions
And Binod

The guy who had a voice like Bogart
The guy who always seemed taller than he was
who had a permanent five day stubble
and who always had a dream and a few poems
to leave you with

"Let not my love be called idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show"

Sometimes Succharita, Shakespeare can make you feel all emotions that there are
She just nodded, willing to believe in every word he said
And while they kissed
she could strangely just think of Roses
Red scarlet Roses and a few thorns scarlet hued too

3
Later she met Rajeeb in Bangalore
He was quiet, shy and Rajeeb
And being Rajeeb slowly became an adjective
Of everything that is so normal that its almost unnoticeable
It seemed as if he was made to be lost in the crowds
He had read Merchant of Venice but no Sonnets
He never believed in struggles and armed revolutions
He who was strangely so comforting even in his presence
That you almost suddenly felt alone

They went to Kasauli and stayed there for a month, after that eventful wedding
The first words that he uttered after their Marriage was
You must be hungry after all this
And even in Kasauli when he made love to her
It was as if he was afraid that he would leave his marks on her
As if he was never meant to claim her

Rajeeb had read Sonnet 105
During one of the sunday lunches at Succahrita's
while he was glancing through her library
and found the brown diary
There was no name
no other mention
but he saw the hand writing
and he knew that he was
just a choice

...
Rajeeb has since
left office at lunch without notice
for she was running temperature
read Wuthering Heights
ran through esplande to buy her the exact flowers on her birthday
when it was pouring hell
stayed at home on mondays faking loose motions
just to see her the whole day
Fell in love with her every morning
Brutally killed his ego

4
In her dreams
There is a voice
'Love is selfish
Love wants this regular need of expressing it
Love makes you weak in knees and everywhere else
Love would bring no revolution
I love you but..
There is life beyond it too
Succharita for once live
and not just breathe'

0
Rajeeb still lives with this constant need of her being around
Succharita sometimes is around
Binod is mammoth in his absence

And we know there are things
'Stranger than Fiction.'

Mundane-

2011-12-30T06:06:00.001-08:00

1
She slowly got used to it
with him
the way her ideas evolve in time
they say Everest was an ocean a few million years ago.

She always knew that the silent,
uninterrupted mark
on her left eyebrow
made when she fell out of bonu didi's hand
through stairs
was considerably poetic
and on certain Saturdays
a few years ago
when she showered for hours
she looked at herself in the mirror
she tried to wipe it.

It was like
the famous writers unappreciated favorite book.

2
And he told him
being the first guy ever,
would it hurt a lot if I kiss you there.

After eight years of consciousness about the opposite sex
and the knowledge of sex.
A few men who were there and yet not.
Writing poems on white A-four sheets with a perfect handwriting.
Whining to friends about females being objectified.
Reading Pamuk, Tolstoy and sometimes trash.
She met him.

3
He who would gaze at her for hours.
Who would describe her beauty impromptu and anew every time.
He who would write complicated poems about her.
Who would never agree that she was 'just normal'.
Who saw her eyebrows,
jawlines,
sad sketches,
expressions,
pain of waking up in the mornings,
hatred for colleagues,
love for knowledge
and fiction
and choco-walnut brownies.

Who would constantly remind her
that full-names are always more beautiful
and life is so much more about now and ahead
rather than gone by's.

4
And when he wasn't around
she strew his clothes and slept.
Tried to smell him in his left over tooth brush.
Stayed indoors.
Touched her eyebrows while looking at the mirror.

Flash fictions,
red wines,
abstract modern art
and football nothing made sense.

And she later got to know
he saw Seinfeld and could never laugh.
Read the same books again and again
till they felt meaningless.
Saw reruns of Liverpool getting thrashed
and felt at ease.
Look at her photographs
and caress the eyebrows.

5
For them
it was still about
the mundane things
like his aftershave,
her small palms,
going through unread books in stores,
laughing madly at powerfully poor jokes,
eating,
writing,
sleeping on shoulders,
listening to heartbeats
and breaths
and Jim Morrison.
And love.
And adding on to their continued story.
Together
Like this one...

...
After twenty years
two brash teenagers
many arguments
equal anecdotes
almost two hundred common poems
breakfasts on bed
intentional sick leaves
unslept nights filled with talks
and sometimes tears
and running towards each other
whenever alone.

They still write
their book of life.

simple love-

2011-12-30T06:05:00.001-08:00

somewhere far away the wind scales
the burning skin of the land
slowly brushing pass
and the hum can be heard clearly
like on virgin sea shores

in the mind of my mind
there is a wilderness
a sense of a haunted night
a calm river bed
and i drown

a few tiny fireflies in my eyes
that light your face
and a sense of pause exists

it is not poetry within the sensibilities of skin
there is no aftertaste of the lingering warmth
that captures us during that instance.
it is simple, straight forward and matter of factly

and shouldn't it be this way
the slow swells of your breath
just there and yet beautiful
like moon shine out of a white night cloud
bereft of the overwhelming presence of poetry
the cage of rhymes and meters
slow, enchanting, felt
and just there
forever and more

Forgotten Verses

2011-12-30T06:03:00.001-08:00

And that day I had written a verse
now I have lost it somewhere
a place I do not know
words, meanings, interpretations, names, signs, smells
all have metamorphosed in a void now
where did my poem go

Did they give her new attires,
hidden intonations
and buy her
or did she just walk through an unknown terrain
and is dwelling now in some dense forest as a native
I am left as a wordless, weak emotion
I am not a poet anymore
am merely
a human now.

Amnesiac Thoughts (Tanima)

2011-11-29T10:34:00.000-08:00

Almost like the left over biryani that you were to eat
for lunch that day after your tests

Salinger's unpublished writes

Dhrubo Mukherjee's epic gaffe at our convocation

The words of 'Ahom' somewhere buried near Silchur

A vague morning dream

Succharita 'The beautiful bombshell' who died in a road rage

The night we drank Jack Daniels and passed out, for a whole day

Palestinian people and their hunger

Video Cassette players and single screen theaters

The almost half read 'Far from the maddening crowd'
somewhere in the cup boards of ekdalia road, your old home

The way you looked at me during Prof. Bose's boring lectures

The lost Atlantis of our imagination

The broken button from your shirt that stuck to my kurta
while we had that botched up kiss underneath Mashima's home

and our names written together in the beach of Digha

Would we forget everything that way, Sayan.

What of our shared memories
would that be forgotten too?

Morning SIckness-

2011-11-29T10:33:00.000-08:00

Silhouettes of the brutal aftermath of our progresses shine
as rains and green grasses are buried into the corners of unknown
and our windows draw illusions of grandeur

We do not look at starry skies anymore, here
for our homes open to the mash of streets and to other homes equally abundant
we move around the same circles
empty faces, isolated walks and random meaninglessness

We do not hold onto emotions
or winter nights
or summer mornings
or metaphors
we live in our comforted nests of concrete
we build walls
we are good at it.

And faraway there are thatched roofs and mud huts
and broken toothed happiness
and mothers who stay hungry but content
and fathers with torn pockets and soiled shirts
and dreams of two square meals

Amidst them lies our broken civilization
and a tinge of blood that spreads like wildfire
where concentrated money and fluid souls breath in peace

And amongst those differences I walk
where there are gray-black skies
and far too many faces and all expressionless
there are no voices just growls

I see men, I see machines
I see smiles and polythene words
and it all makes sense

They ask me
have you stopped writing poetry these days

Monochromed thoughts-

2011-11-25T00:02:00.000-08:00

And for all we can see right now of this girl called Tanima
-is the half braided night of her hair

and a filtered afternoon cloud

and intermittent showers

and clasped lower lip half perched on the upper

and a suit case full of metaphors that her beautiful broken
(of a childhood injury) eye brows deserve.

And the little fog of a mirage that the vapors from the tea make
of a smoke screen
or an award winning oil painting.
(Once Mrs. Chakraborty complimented her this way.)

And Amrita Pritam canvassed angular face and voice
twenty eight and unslept lunar eclipsed eyes

and yet you wish you would see her clearly if she turned just a bit.

................................................................................................

For all we know of her she might be thinking of now are
those people who still exist outside the periphery of this watered city of hers.

People who have read all of Kant and Carroll.

People who you want to run to when you cry.

People who eat their curries before their chicken.

People whose passing graze shudders your soul.

People who can never say no to a cup of tea or a discussion about missile crisis.

People with whom you would like to see Lake Titicaca and also a broken hut on an unknown village.

People who when they smile stop your world.

People who can write poetry imitating Neruda or Bukowski.

People who are sad sunsets and a joyous sunrise altogether.

People who are still confused between Vivian Leigh and Ingrid Bergman.

People who remind you of Sunday afternoons.

People who would watch 'Pyasa' and 'Meghe Dhaka Tara' with you five times
and let you cry on their shoulders always.

People who speak less and think more.

People who look at you with love and sometimes hunger.

People who you think of on every vacation or while a train noisily passes by.

People for whom love is not just a word.

People who leave a sad longing and a smile on your lips while you sleep.

People about whose face you paint in your mind while looking from your balcony at the rain right now.

People like me who scribble just to be read by her and no one else.

Or maybe
she is not thinking anything as of now.

Critical review of a boring half abridged book-

2011-11-23T22:53:00.001-08:00

1 (The Beginning)

What we could never know throughout the course of the story
is the actual color of her eyes
he once momentarily writes though
about the evening sun in French Vineyards
or the beauty he found while reading Rumi.

He mentions of the smiles that lingered around him
when he walked in the middle of December
near a small chilly Hamlet in Uttaranchal
and the Tolstoyic description of the female protagonists.

2( In Between Somewhere)

Throughout it all her eyes remain a mystery to us.
We know that she giggled
while they talked of tiny little things
like Alice, through the looking glass,
the way she hated eggplants,
how she found him 'oh! so cute'
when he woke up in the mornings,
that how happy she is when he tells her most mundanely
to 'take care' over phone
and ofcourse PGW.
But not her eyes.

He once glances past it in his story
when he tells that
she had tiny little feet
that did perfectly fit into the gap just beneath his joined knees
while she lied over him
just to listen to his heartbeat.
And he while telling her about Morichjhapi, Naxalbari and his childhood
slowly caresses the skin above her eyebrows
that feels a little rough like Styrofoam
especially when you consider the softness of her eyelids
but not the color.

3(Slow End)

And as the story ends we see that he ventures around the idea
of her as a fresh painted wall
or a newly washed bed-sheet
that he loved her presence and sometimes her thoughts in absence
and the way she called his name as if her life depended on it
through the broken alphabets in her chocolate brownie inviting voice.

And just after that
he thinks of all good things in his life
that nobody mostly knows about
like the joy of reading Salinger
or listening to Beatles
or walking upstairs to fourth floor to meet Nando and fly kites with him
or his first written unread poetry
or to see her smile while trying to speak her broken Bangla
but not the color of her eyes
ever.

4(Comments)

Because no one
absolutely no one
deserves to know the color of your eyes
as no one can love you the way I do.

And we are left with
a half empty
unfolded rumor of a story.

Shomoy Hole

2011-11-23T22:51:00.000-08:00

Shono shedin je tram'er sathe
rasta gune
alipur road gechilam
mone aache
jokhon shishir'er hawa
mukh bhijiye chilo
aar bikel hotat eshe
jeno kono chena ochena gaan
tomar aawaj diye tule chilo.

Shono o je Jibanando'r Bonolata
aami tomay diye chilam
aajo rekhecho to ?

ki, aajo badi phera'r pothe
'tumi robe nirobe' gao?

Aami kintu aar tram line'er
eyi shohor'e thaki na,
aamar shishir to ushno hoye
ekla poth haate.

Aami je robi thakur'er chando
aar podte pari na go,
jano aapcha-aapcha lage,
ekhon aar aamar kono poth
badi fere na.

Aami aar aasha-jawa roi ni
aami sthir ekta somoy.
aajo shei alipur road'e
aik rasta'r shesh kona'e
shesher kobita hoye
tomay na peye'i dadano

shomoy pele daikha korte esho.

English Translation

(missing the original flavor)

And we walked with the tram
counting pathways and went to Alipur Road,
Do you remember that
And we watered our faces and souls
in the winters
while the evening sang a known yet unknown song
in you voice

Do you still have that Banalata Sen
of Jibananda that I gave you?

Do you still sing 'Tumi Robe Nirobe' -
(You are in the silent crevices of my heart, my beloved)
while you walk back home?

You know,
I do not live in this town of Tram lines anymore
And my winters walk alone and humid

I cannot read Tagore's verses now
They seem hazy to me, somehow
And none of my paths come back home

Now, I am not the idea of a wanderer or homecoming
I am a moment stopped
I still live in one of the streets of Alipur road
somewhere near it ends
I am shesher kobita now
(Tagore's 'last song')
I still am bereft of you

So, if time permits
do pass by someday

Confessions-

2011-11-13T23:19:00.000-08:00

I imagine
your eyes
and desire
a daily dose
of caramel cookies
Sometimes
I drink myself silly
and
then I argue
about the utility of life
I travel around
meeting strangers
but not talking
to them
I observe
unknown
I look at
the horizon
and sunsets
and know
that they by no chance
shall change
their course
for my
pain
I listen
to "Hey Bulldog"
and it
makes no sense
I write
keeping the world
at bay
poetries,
about
the subtleties
of existence
poems
basically meaningless
Your name is
metonymy, pars pro toto
synecdoche
for my survival
and guilt
and wounds
And
I
delude myself
into believeing
that your eyes
after all
are never as beautiful
never were
never shall be
as in my dreams

-Sayantan

As I See It-

2011-11-11T23:29:00.001-08:00

This one is for you the little ones
with glee and fairies and prince's
it is strange but things shall change, no matter
the world shall not stay as it is

This one is for you of yonder
with wrinkled smiles, loneliness and frayed hair
as you walk in to the sunshine and swansongs of the day
let them know they'll be the same, only then will they be able to prepare

This one is for you the mighty ones
with the lust of power and stars
paint the world in colors of goodness
do not leave it unhelped and scar'd

This one is for you the hopefuls
with dreams, aims and desires
there shall be failures, heartbreaks and melancholy
none gets of all that he aspires

This one is for all of us the mortals
we shall not stay here all around
but let us care for the future and live in the now
within us lies possibilities of goodness and joys, unbound

The Tanima Ailment-

2011-11-11T23:26:00.000-08:00

One
And strangely his heart craves for not her
but Dolai Kaki's Radhabollobhi or another of those nolen gurer sondesh
And that he wants to get up and walk
and then run far away to the jungle and not to her
For the umpteenth time he is trying to remember the name of the first poem
that he wrote and the name eludes him
He just knows
that he writes cheap poems
has a woeful sense of fashion
a minus two on his eyes
And that even if he tried he could not have cried
like one of those charecters in Sarat Chandra books who hide behind their smiles
but he wishes he could just hold onto her and cry

Two
We found him near a rail road track near north Dinajpur
wonder how he reached there
He was tired and drunk
and muttering obcenities
Every once in a while he spoke some Shakespearean line
I think from "taming of the shrew"
He had a scar near his upper lip and his right palm
Even after such a tragedy the first thing he asked me was,
"O ki gelo?" [Has she gone?]
I just held onto him

Three
I woke up with a backache exactly like I had after those tennis sessions with you
I smell of cuticura
and from the windows I can smell Adam's Marlboro
I wanted to moan his name out when he entered me last night
instead I said God
Never have I believed in God before
but only he can be so brutally honest and painful
I wonder if I scream who shall know
Or it'll be interpreted as a dream
Honestly Sayan, there is nothing romantic about pain nor life
I wish I could tell you this
and cry

Four
The morning reminds me
of the early summer mornings in Lancaster
I can smell her on me and jasmine
Today strangely I think of the twelve year old Adam Marlowe
and how he wanted to know India
There are things that shall stay with me from the foggy today
The special tea that they gave me in the morning
Her painful smile last night
And the trace of tear that left her eye just then
Have I failed you Tanima
I wish you would wake up and talk to me
I wish we would just hold on to each other and cried

Afterword
And the illusion of love and life stayed ever after

Dreams

2011-11-09T23:29:00.000-08:00

Dreams, you know we lived in this place till I was sixteen. My Grandpa lived there since partition and all my father's side was virtually born there. I still sometimes have these dreams where I go to that place and everything has changed around but that home of ours is still intact and I see my Father's Hero Honda kept outside our place my Grandpa sitting and dozing in the mild warmth of an approaching evening, my Grandma up on the roof watering the tulsi, my Sis a dressed up three year old walking holding my mother’s hand and my Dad standing on the doorway hands folded on his chest a picture of strength and reliability as ever.

This dream in particular has no Freudian explanations but somehow this is one image, one dream that gives me hope, something to carry on. And years after when I am old and worn out and erasing I want to still see that dream so that I can believe that when it all ends I shall still be a living dream in someone’s memory.

Some of you might say that am holding on to something that has already been emptied and shall never be. But for me it is an unadulterated image of all the love, warmth and care that is irreplaceable.

I have almost never had a nuclear family and even now when all my Dad's siblings have a separate home we almost all live together. So, the way I am today is a reflection of all those people in my life. And hence I have these collective dreams. I have never been the blue eyed boy. I have always had someone else to emulate someone to be like and truth is I never could.

I never could be the first in class or the first in a hundred meter sprint and all those things and I have envied those people who did. People who had things to show for in their success charts. But I still have been loved by them all without questions but sometimes just sometimes you want to give back and so you dream.

I have been liked and mostly I have always been considered good but these things were never quantitative and we cannot state success in qualitative parameters. So, what I want is to run for my goals perhaps be amazingly good at something, I want to be the stand alone in crowd as after all what you want is to be loved and respected and wanted. I want people around me to be proud of me. I want to be proud of myself.

But I know again that such happiness’s are sadly momentary and as soon as you get something the world shall make you run and want to achieve the next thing because as far as society is concerned perhaps you are never good enough.

And hence as much as I would want to be in the race I would like to be detached of it all and know that I am living in the now and the now contains no success, no failure, and no rejections nothing except me and this state of mind. I am ambitious but I want to condition myself to be receptive and reflective and yet happy within me.

What I have learned is that the saddest thing that can happen to you is to see your folks cry for something that has happened to you and the happiest thing is to see a reflection of happiness in their eyes after you've done something, something as small as making a cup of tea for them.

What I have learned is that success, failure, losses and wins are all a matter of perception. That the guy who you see all successful and achieving is lacking something that you so easily have. That if there is a word called love, it has unconditional attached to it there is no love absolutely no love that shall ask of you something.

And people who do love you, they shall just love you and while I write this I think of the image of my father, mother and my sister I know I have let them down at times but what they remember now is that they love me and that I love them back.

I have learned that in the long run nothing else, no achievement shall count as much as the people for whom you want to achieve them. So, I have learned that you must know that those people are far bigger and important than any achievements. And that sometimes, sometimes you shall give the whole world just to see them smile.

I have always loved books not just reading them but sometimes just being around them looking at them. Someday I would like to own a library at my place and a fireplace too. from the love of books steams the idea of perhaps penning down one someday I do not know what and how it is going to be or even if am going to write one at all for now I’d just like to think that I would. I want to read everything under the sun what I would want to have is some knowhow of everything that has to be.

It’s strange but even as a kid I never wanted new clothes or toys.
Even now I am not a gadget freak my ideas barely qualify as luxury I want good books, good food, great thoughts and riveting conversations.
I want to grow as a human every day, every moment and yet be me.
I want to know and yet not let knowledge corrupt me.
I want to see things unseen and yet not be too proud or too vain.
I want to be deep and meaningful and yet fun to be with.

The problem has always been not being able to produce something exceptional to be something great. I have always been one of the nice guys, one of the good students, one of the better writers, one of the best friends and I always wanted to be 'The Guy' but then again when I look at it aren't all our lives lived that way don't we all see ourselves in so many strata’s and don't we all want to break off the shackles and be free.

Eventually we all realize that life is a prototype same experience that we all have. Life is mostly lived in these almirah full of emotions.

I always want to remember that this is one life that we all have been given and I am not here for long and hence act accordingly I don't want to fight, live in bitter memories, pity myself do anything like that I do not want to leave my footprints of bad moments here I want to love unconditionally those who love me.

I want to meet people and learn about their lives and vicariously live through their joys and smiles, I want to travel the whole world, I want to be unknown and experience life first hand, I want to let go of all the expectations attached to achievements and live, I want to be filled with life.

Because mind has an amazing ability to restore your happiness’s and moments spent in love rather than material possessions as the time goes by.

I want to marry the mind of my woman I want to love her thoughts and I want to find her beautiful even when am seventy as her eyes still have the same twinkle and her face the same old smile. I want to make her feel loved and beautiful just by the way I look at her or sometimes by virtue of the things I have written. I want to evolve with her I want it all to happen as naturally as season changes and still I want at times to feel special.

I want to be accepted with all my follies and I want to be comfortable in love and understand that things shall not always be smooth and one needs to work on as you go along but yes I would want a shared experience of intimacy.

I do not want to be waited at dinner for that would be unjustified. I do not want to be treated as perfect because I am not. I do not want to be loved because it is what you are meant to do. I do not want to be respected out of tradition. I want to be written a diary entry about and not be told. I want to be loved because I can never light match sticks. I want to be cared for because it is something that so happens. I want to be looked at with admiration because I make you proud.

I want to look inside me and find warm cares for people I have not yet met. I want to be responsible for my family both that there is and the one that shall be, I want to go on holidays and send picture postcard of my whole lot smiling and standing in the snow. In simplicity is where I want to find pleasures. In books. Music, family, love and Nano-moments of shared smiles.

In nutshell-
My dream is to dream, hope love and live

Incognito in Bombay-

2011-11-09T21:35:00.000-08:00

And she walks in with those hazy eyes and a little overdone mascara
She is the only woman in Bombay that Sayantan wants to look at
around her eyes corners, around her almost eraseable dimples
when she licks her lips after two minutes of continues blabbering
and at nights while she is sleeping next to him
but he knows that she is not Tanima

And she asks him,
"Aami ki ore moton?"
(Am I like her)

And he knows not
For he knew her when she was eighteen and had just entered Presidency
For he knew her when she felt Jane Austen is too widely-limited
When she first went out with Debashish and kissed him
When she wrote her first poem about a woman who is clueless of her way
When Deb left her and she cried till four
and he had to physically take her out of her bed to brush
when he wrote her a poem and kept it to himself not to let it be seen
when she wore that blue denim for the first time
when she used the f word and felt liberated
when she was the only woman he could fall in love with
when she had not met Adam

And he smiles
You know I once wrote a poem
Let me read it to you,

And he rendered his only bangla words
in his glib South Calcutta style

"Tumi aamar moner moton,
kintu tumi shey to naa.
Tumi to shriti'r bagan'e
krishnochura ekti phul.

Aami tomaye proti'ti ronge prem korbo.
Aalo'r moton opekkhakrito thakbo
tobe phul tulbo na.
Shokal'er aalo shudhu amaar jonne to nei.

Aami jani tumi aamar shokal na
Aami bujhi tumi shey na."

Which roughly translates into
"You are like my soul's song
But you are not her
You are a daisy in the garden of my memories
You are a delonix

I shall love you in colors and hues
And await you like the morning lights
Though shall not displume you,
you are not meant too
The morning light is not just for me, dear.

You are not my morning
you are not her."

And yet he caresses her face
And yet his fingers instinctively find hers

And she buries her head and sobs

And he tells her with a wry smile,
"You know her tears on my shoulders were never shed for me.
And anyway there is no woman named Tanima
or no city like Calcutta anymore."

None at all-

2011-11-08T00:02:00.000-08:00

There is an unhinged door
and a closet filled with spaces,
where sunlit noons make way for the evenings.
And a solecism of voice and colors
draw patterns on a river
where waits a boat of poetry
as I begin to sail along words and verses.

Sometimes I make no meanings at all
as night calls me
I just walk along the path of meaningless metaphors
and a quiet subdued home of a frayed yellow page.

Then something draws me to write

something intangible
and an overwhelming figure of a poem taps on the door
with a hope to grow full
breathing the essence of your name and nothingness.

And amidst
many titles that I could
call this poem of yours by
I call it silences.
Living,
understated
and understood
making meanings sans words
like you
to me.

Strangers in the Night-

2011-11-06T01:23:00.001-07:00

Zero

Across walls
he can hear a familiar hum of her breaths
he has gone through it the whole night
and for exactly fifteen minutes after three thirty
she snored which he knows she would never admit
and he smiles
perhaps for the first time in the last eight hours

Four

Just a month after their wedding
he was running hundred and two
and she the woman with ocean eyes
and salt pepper lips
winner of Miss Scottish Church-99
holds his hands and cries all night long
strangely comforting him
and he says, “I’ll not die of fever you know."
While she punches him through her tiny palms.
And then that morning he wrote a note to her

"At night my lost memory of you returned
and I was like the empty field where springtime,
without being noticed, is bringing flowers;
I was like the desert over which
the breeze moves gently, with great care;
I was like the dying patient
who, for no reason, smiles."

Faiz- Agha Shahid

Three

He sat quietly without any idea of what is happening
For all he knows they may marry him
The quacker way
It’s strangely humid in there Alipore rd home.
Thinking of Coetzee and his book Youth
and yet her
"It’s warm dammit."
As she sees her
clad in the Benarasi
she mentioned in their phone calls
a month ago
smiling, face downwards, walking
and he realizes what exactly was she bearing
in this Calcutta summer
and he wants to reach out and say-
"Are you mad, by any chance?
how can you wear it in this season."
But silently watches her carrying herself
in the whole pageant beauty way that she has.
And falls in love all over.

"In centuries. She comes to stand at dusk —
Her spot each time the same — and to foretell.
She is a hollow, wrinkled husk,
Dark as a fire-gutted citadel.

Around her. Then, returning home to roost,
They find a perch beneath her eyebrows' eaves,
And in that shadow wait for night to fall."
Rilke

He wrote in his diary
just an hour after
he made love to her
for the first time as a wedded pair.

Two

It’s the chilly Boston winters
with snow white and long nights
and in the newton campus hall he receives her letter
and it has
Tolstoy,
John Denver,
Neruda,
Hindustan Times edit cut
and her words
as he thinks of her
standing in queue back home
for two hours to send him this

"The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.
Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.

Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.

Here I love you.
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain."
Neruda

One

And he heard
for the first time
while she was talking
of this new writer she really did like
And he listens and walks in the labyrinth
of her voice
he has heard of the writer
but he keeps mum
he cannot let go of the magic

And that night he did try to count the stars
and in the morning
called her again
to make sure she was alright
and he heard her smile on phone
and he knew that he shall fall in love
“Take Care.” while hanging up he said
I shall, she said

He wrote

Of all things
Socialism,
Sicilian defense,
Sunday afternoons,
The Ninth Symphony,
Salinger,
The Voluptuous Mrs Chaterjee of the fourth floor,
Caucasian Chalk Circle
And Amy Goodman
Of all things said and done
I fell for you

Zero

And she
breaths
with the silent slow hum
eyes opened and heart too
as she feels the bedroom door unlock
and closes her eyes
pretending sleep

And he
falls next to her
burying his nose on her neck
She feels his warm breath on herself
after eight lifetime long hours

And a noiseless smiling tear
traces her face
he says
"Believe me you snore.
But you smell great.
You do"

Friday- The nameless girl

2011-11-03T00:40:00.001-07:00

1
She has those eyes
that remind him of Katherine Ross, he thinks
as he goes down on her.
And she slowly sighs.
Lips twitched
She has a mysterious face
and a sunset dusk on her skin.
And he feels with her he has to be cautious,
he slows down
and so does she
but he knows he shall devour her.
And 'Hello darkness' plays

2
After everything he stays awake
besides her
as she asks him all those things
like his earliest memories
his dreams
his fears
childhood summer vacations
his folks
Looks at him like a child, expectantly
as he smokes
and he asks her the only question
the only thing
"Do you write?"
And doesn't wait for an answer

3
Closing his eyes
for a moment inbetween his drag
he feels it is still Tanima
he can smell her
as he always could
like the faintness of his own old spice on her lips
like mornings
like the fresh pages of telegraph
like the tea at Esplanade
like the water of Hoogly
like the winter breeze in Park street
like 'Purano shei diner kotha' on transistor
like reruns of Seinfeld
like 'Shesher Kobita'
like Presidency
like 2001
like only she could

And she says-" Shono Sayan,
make love to me again,
will you?"

meaningless, nothingness

2011-11-02T01:28:00.002-07:00

Unhurried and monotonus
I walk back from the sea shore
With wet feet
and a soul
that refuses to be pleased

And the sunset behind
holds the crawling magic of mundane
With beauty and nostalgia
and an everyday panorama as it lies

For all I know
years ago a man who looked
exactly like this
would have walked back
from a similar sea shore'd sunset
as tranced and yet banal
as I have,
now
and years later
there shall be
the same looking me
walking away
of the same sun
unhurried and monotonus

The only movement
that there is
the moving time
and relative
nothing else moves
and yet all of it does
with me and past and future

Strange as it is
Once I look back again
and think
of how this nothingness
and stale prose
that is life
holds infinite meanings and yet not

Unhurried and monotonus and mundane
meaningless,nothingness

Evenings & Nights & Homes

2011-11-02T01:28:00.001-07:00

The Sisyphus, Segismund dilemma of an unscripted write-

2011-10-29T20:44:00.000-07:00

A character is never the author who created him.
It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.
-Albert Camus

1
Imrul wants to make films that leave you shocked
He is Bergman's 'Aus dem Leben der Marionetten' and more
He knows Jonaki loves him but as in his movie
There is always a BUT that spoils everything
As for Jonaki she has Vronsky and Darcy in Imrul
She has read Imrul's sonnets while copying his notes
She finds his talks fascinating
She is about to call him again.
Diganto does not believe in love he finds it absurd
He has Kafka and Kierkegaard and Existentialism filled in himself
He shall write a story that has no script, no central charecter just life
as it is.
Poushali is confused
she thinks she is an intellectual and reads 'The Myth of Sisyphus'
She knows not much, she knows a lot
That 'the absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.'

2
Diganto is yet to pen a poem but he dreams of being a writer one day
Meanwhile he is looking for inspiration in Poushali's eyes.
Imrul does not want to work in Calcutta he is leaving for Bombay tonight.
Jonaki cannot bear the idea of letting him go.
She has not read a page of her Albert Camus in the last three days.

3
Imrul wishes Poushali knew how much he desired her.
Imrul has written fourteen sonnets in the last twenty pages
of his Political Sciences notes copy.
Poushali ray finds this city stifling
Her creativity is at stake here.
She wants to be lost in the swelling crowds of BowBajar
She wants to live and breathe and feel alive and be absurd
Jonaki is all love

4
Diganto smokes his Marlboro and thinks of an idea
that he could create about the idea of life.
Poushali walks by College Street wanting to run away to meaninglessness
Imrul is going to a whore house trying to live his film
Jonaki is contemplating suicide
'Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux: c'est le suicide.'

In Five Years-
Diganto shall be working in Telegraph, Calcutta
covering local news, married to a girl from Garia
still waiting for that one novel he'll pen

Poushali shall be the second wife of Mr. Salil Kanti Mukherjee
and live in West Virginia trying to decipher her life, still

Imrul will become an intense alcoholic
working as an assistant in Bengali main stream cinema
and still desire Poushali

Jonaki will be long gone

and life shall remain as inconclusive and absurd and unscripted as it always was

...While I
I shall know
that Diganto,Poushali,Imrul and Jonaki
none exist
that it is me who creates and dissolves them
that sometimes I pen things just to please me
that they are a state of my own recollections
of a sub-conscious life
that I shall take solace in the ideas of
Camus, Kafka and Brothers Karamazov.

That perhaps even I am a dream of an old man
waiting to wake up
that it is a dream, in a dream, in a dream
that existential dilemma is and shall be
that dreams may have no meanings and scripts
nor would life
neither my stories...

His Diary-

2011-10-24T19:38:00.000-07:00

Tanima told me that I was worthy of being crazy about.
She actually wanted to shout out my name off the roof.
I remained silent and looked at her.

And when she prodded told her that she was mad.
I wonder why I cannot give words to my ideas
I wonder..

PS- If I could
I would call your name
Everytime I Read Salinger
Saw Brechtian's play
Used the Najdorf variation
Speak about Engels
Listen to Beethoven's 9 on 'Ode to joy'
Talk to the four year old nando of the second floor
Spend a winter afternoon at home

Do something that moves me,
strains me,
overjoys me,
makes me smile
If I could
I would call your name quietly
whenever I view the sun set

..Or even when I exhaled.

PPS- And as you would say its bā-ˌtō-vən and not bee-tho-one

Perhaps-es :

2011-10-23T22:06:00.000-07:00

[From the diary of Tanima
about Adam]

He has those deep set blue eyes

He writes poetries
hugely inspired by the likes of Cummings,
but writes good

He walked me to home last night in the chilling winters of Manchester
sans his dinner jacket and still was warm when he hugged me.

He has this wide grin that fills your heart
and an English accent that sometimes makes you laugh.

Jane Austin is just a romantic female author to him
and not someone with socialist connotations

Unlike all men I have known he has no revolutionary Ideals and Ideas

He does not know that Bengal is a place too in India and not just a language

He knows I cannot write poetry but is still appreciative of my know-how of literature

He is too verbose at times
and on others he is a reticent little pup.

He finds me beautiful and curvaceous and tiny

In the last two weeks he has told me twenty six times that he loves me

For him Calcutta is me and Tagore and slums perhaps

For him love happens like accidents or rains

For me love happens like seasons with a slow gathering momentum.

He is still fixated on the Shakespearean idea of love and tragedy

I know that love and even tragedy sometimes just happen
wordless, nameless and unknown they stay.

and the difference is for him falling in love with me
is a natural gradual next step

for me it is like wearing a new soul entering a new home.

And that I want him to find me not just beautiful and curved but like an idea as well
an honest utopian idea

And that I can perhaps love him and respect him but I cannot write poetry for him
as whenever I sit and write it is all about the words that were filled in my ears by him at Presidency

And he does not know that sometimes for me Calcutta is
just a horn rimmed bespectacled young man with vocal ideas

But tonight when he held my hands
and embraced me while walking back it was overwhelming

He kissed me on my cheeks

and told me for the twenty seventh time that he loved me

I smiled

And yet somehow...

If I Could-

2011-10-22T07:38:00.000-07:00

If I could
It is the fragrance of your voice
that I wish I could hold onto,

The aroma of it
a reminiscent
of all things known and familiar.

Things essential to let me be.
Like
newspapers,
poetry
and home.
---------------------

Here in the mornings of my world
there is almost everything
fresh coffee beans,
a sun full of warmth in my windows,
the clean visible lines of the floor
and the approaching known winter.
Yet something is missed.

Perhaps the knowledge of my being,
maybe a sense of belonging
or the assuring glow of your eyes.

I wish I could clasp
all our goodbye's in my palm
give them a perceptible human form.
And then I would've lived with it
until the end of our shared hiatus.

But then
however greedy I may sound
it is good somehow.

As the flickering light of your thoughts
and the known absence of you
gives life to the dying poet inside me.
And I scribble something akin to a poem.
Without which my poet shall cease to breath.

... You know,
It's this way
I grope for your voice in the unknown
and I end up catching a verse

nothing else happened-

2011-10-16T00:17:00.000-07:00

and then
the sun rose
unheard,
unsung,
surreptiously
as if the night
had consented itself
of its crime

and I was left with
a strand of your hair
and your smell on me

and the sun stayed
as if nothing else happened.

And it stays-

2011-10-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

Once every winter morning
when the sun in this town of mine
is too lazy to wake up
and little dew drops clasp my window,
my window turns into a canvas of a smokescreen,
of fog
and recollections

I draw your face in it
and the tiny water droplets
flow like a tear through your eyes
your image is what I hold onto

Once every winter morning
the season stays
with the fog
and dew
and me

On other days I write
like there has been nothing
I ever knew,
that resembled you

...I write of the seasons
and the city
and the people
and the unnamed,
intangible,
guileless emotions
of mundane

But I write not about you
but voids
so that the melee of my words
abandon me
and am left alone
barren of my poetries
and my stories
and my defenses

...So that am left alone just with you...

Part Us

2011-10-13T23:38:00.001-07:00

And I live in your stories,
your words even pauses
structured into well knit commas and fullstops.

As you paint me a horizon
that is just about to come in existence
with the first rays
accompanied by a newly lit sky
and some floating clouds over sea.

Now,
put me in the sketched canvas of your memories and presents
like glowing mornings and passionate nights.
Make love to me as if this pause shall end my poem.

.....

And let me live
in your thoughts and ideas
juxtaposed into a now and then
and if's and surity's.

I live as a mirage of your love.

Peruse me and keep me as a bookmark
of all your readings.

And know that
I evolve and grow every moment
with every bit of broken laughter that you send my way.

Marinated in the warmth of your cares
I transform
becoming part love
and part you

Making Senses

2011-10-07T02:32:00.001-07:00

In the silences
of ocean and my shadows
dwell a few fragmented memories
a long walk back home through woods,
soft murmurs of my name on your lips,
dusky evening lights on your satin skin
a hint of a kiss that stays forever.
and I make love to you
like a traveler of a hundred countries, finding home
But as indiscretions of memories are
they have a way of making you a martyr
and you know for all I am around everyone,
inside am just a victim of your kiss.
And your voice amidst a thousand voices
remains alone just like me
letting me walk through
the dreary plateaus of this unknown land.

Someday,
sometime soon
I shall lie quietly next to you
and perhaps then
everything will start making sense

For happily ever afters-

2011-10-07T02:31:00.001-07:00

‎[makes no sense]

1

For a moment just a moment
Sayantan feels that he still is with Tanima.
Stark, raving, mad
as they were always
and that he reads PGW to her
a perfectly funny anecdote in some wild country side Europe
but like the ghost Heathclif
the picture of a tall imposing Adam breaths again.
He sees London like it was always the place he was meant to live in
and not Calcutta.

Calcutta of Madhushudon,
Fort William,
Wyatt architecture,
Bowbazar
Hoogly
and Tanima.

2

Tanima has no memory of Sayantan
or even Calcutta
for Adam knows none of it
she loves how Adam dotes on her
and how everything seems so perfect
and she still maintains
that she has never read any PGWs in her life,
I just cannot fathom them.

But somedays she thinks of an unknown ocean of a city,
that never existed
where there lives no man
and all she allows herself to think of
is a moment just a stolen moment
where he recites in all the slowness of his breaths
with each word falling to her lips

"I know 'tis but a Dream, yet feel more anguish
Than if 'twere Truth. It has been often so:
Must I die under it? Is no one near?
Will no one hear these stifled groans and wake me?"

3

Sayantan recites Coleridge to no one in particular
and when it rains outside his windows
he walks through "Fears in Solitude" as his only companion
and writes about a set of palms
that caught rains midway
only to splatter on his face
and he smiles.

He knows there is no blank verse better than this.
Someday he shall go back to Calcutta
like a visitor and sit around hoogly
and the slow gushing steam of silence that it is,
of all the broken verses he has,
and a torn memory of a moving picture that was,
shall move in this ocean of a city where no one now lives
but a shadow story
and a rumored remnant of a smile.

Perhaps he shall write a poem someday
a poetry that has nothing in it but blank verses
and dark tides.

4

Now, Sayantan packs his bags
for an ocean of a city
and a blank verse of a river
and a city sans a what if

And somewhere else
Adam sleeps peacefully
and Tanima feels his breath rising and falling.
She just woke up of a dream.
She has never been to anyplace but here she knows
but she had a dream of a river dark tide,
some rains outside windows
and an unpromised blank verse.
That never happened.

But they are just dreams
that make no sense
nothing ever happens
never did

And Adam sleeps peacefully

And they stay
Happily ever after.

Longings and Lodgings-

2011-10-04T16:00:00.001-07:00

the lazy warmth of a lost summer day
perches stutteringly in the branches of a broadwood tree near my home
now
there are no shadows left of evenings and the orange skies
just the moonless twilights live
sprinkling bits of darkness through the doors

my eyes recognize the dark
unknown of the white silences
and those days
when my soul was not roped with the desire to be stoic
where smiles still had names
and a home of bougainvilleas called me back.

but that is gone now and a subtle chill of rational resides
in the tampered nests of my heart
where there is no poetry
only the rhymless letters of my name
bereft of you
and sunrays
and nothingness

and with the approaching darkness
of winters
things move
like time

as am left with
a withering cloud,
few nameless kisses,
a broken metaphor
and your memories

and all while i long for
a forgotten summer day,
lost childhood,
love
and me

Back & Forth, along-

2011-09-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

I have seen long shadows of evening
fall out of the eyes of cloud.
I have measured spoonful of happiness
in the open bottle of sunrise
I have smelt the approaching winters
midst the yellow grasses of a lonely
lake side.
And all along I have tried
to write poetries that rhyme with your name

I have walked through plateaus of breezy wind
and dark mangroves
where rains wash away memories
and yet I spell words
redolent of this muted distance that we share.
Mindful of every second
that I have longed for your voice.

While fleetingly
in the curtained windows of future
I have caressed the corners of your face
through my fingers
reliving all that is
but yet to be felt,
touched
and desired between us.

And the touches of your skin on my senses tell me that
there can be no poetry that rhymes with your name
and our separation
that I have to sew you in the realm of reality
for some poem to flow.

And as I carve you, poem-less
Sometime soon
a kosher day shall halt lazily to stay with us.
Veritable with chestnut hues
and whispering mornings
and you
and me
to make up for all the days
that crowd into this lost moment of my love

Simple Stories

2011-09-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

Often truth is just an unstructured tale
that quietly seeps into the soul
where then poetry just seems
an undesirable ornament
Truth stays, like fragment of a salty summer breeze
rhyming the wind chimes of your name
on my window.

Understated,
simple,
unobtrusive
and there.

I walk among the shadows
like a silent visitor to the land of subtlety.
Where poetry is alien and we sleep within the luxury of a story, our story.

A moment spent in yearning is all what poetry entails
while the miracle of banal stories
walks through the rain forests of hope.

Where I call your name like a hymn of longing
erasing in a pause the distances of voices, oceans and continents

In the nest of your name
lies the comfort of home.

As all the cliched verses of your name
on my night sky stand alone
like metaphors for your eyes,
a sidereal bird in between river and the moon.
I see you as distinct as a white cloud in blue sky.

And for those moments I unlearn to think of you
until the air and the sky conspires me to come back.

And what remains
is a story,
a home
and your name.

...And Yet

2011-09-10T16:29:00.000-07:00

My lonely planet
of rough smudged edges
and harsh nomadic resplendence
is just that

I live in this home as a
wanderer, and the empty spaces
bereft of your presence
seems obtrusive
where you are missed
like childhood memories.

And among all my follies
that I admit, do know
that my love for you
shall always arise
from the silent ocean of words
and gush into the poetries
of your shadows.

Wordless,
rhymeless,
ageless
and yet

Ruins

2011-09-09T00:02:00.000-07:00

In the stilted contours
of this virgin night
under the carpet of an almost dark, dismal sky

like an abandoned mansion
of lost splendor and erased years
I wait.

And night after night
I stay amidst the ruins of my own selves
surrounded by the wild hedges of memories
curling me like a serpent, encapsulating me
as if my shadows in the dark.

And in the hazy drapes
of those unembellished leafs of your memories
I embrace you

You are an archipelago of oasis
in an unknown desert of
far off distant humans.

The remnants of the thousand wreckage
that am left with for now
craves for the caressing solitude of your touch.

So that I live
unlike the rumor of a dream,
like forgotten love,
like a drowned wistful yearning of a man
that I am now

Things that last-

2011-09-03T10:27:00.000-07:00

Slowly, like blooming daisies like a silent summer river like thoughts in quivering frozen nights. we hold each other dripping and vanishing into wilderness of the scented jungles of memory. We walk back and forth but time freezes, reassuring us of everlasting caresses that stoke fire of our passions. And what remains is a painted path of love that elopes into a molten we. As I reside in you. And you reside in me. And we stay forever. A glowing sun of intimacy.Faraway an enchanting night star merges into the dark sky

No Man's Land-

2011-08-17T09:52:00.000-07:00

I do not now write for me
neither are my stories carved
in the figures of a distant world
that is you.
I pen but for moments,
some moments, that spread
amid here to the crowded terrain
of future

I write to a meanwhile

To the day
where I shall find you
like a reclaimed lost home

And while then
we shall caress
our fulfilled destinies
and this slowly filled,
complimenting completness of
our togetherness.

I write for time in between
for the no mans land that lies
between a now and a then

For maybe till that time
my words shall act
as a future memory
to let us breathe and live

And bridge
the gaps inbetween
with love, hope, intimacy
and us.

meandering

2011-08-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

And while our moons are separated now.
I wish I could hold you in me
like I hold the memories of your voice, your face and togetherness.

And perhaps then
I shall not be alone
in the land of thousands.

Someday if you can
just erase yourself
into my words
and come here.

Just come here...

If Only-

2011-07-14T04:45:00.000-07:00

1
Shagorika is prettier than the evening clouds, says Rajeeb.
And thinks of the black-hazel eyes

Shagorika likes Rajeeb too.
He is the only guy she knows who will never question her choices.
He knows what it actually means to feel something you read.
He can sketch her writings into its natural tenable meanings.
He can be quite yet make her feel normal.
He can catch her back when she has meandered too far.
He can listen to her cry at Two in the night and not say anything.
He is the only guy in Calcutta she can call as a friend.

2
You are what I would like to make me someday, Shagorika says.

Shagorika is simple, quite, charming yet sometimes intimidating.
She dislikes reading romances.
Though she loves good literature and Darjeeling tea and hates rains.
She keeps a diary but no one knows not even Rajeeb
She can face the world alone but sometimes just sometimes-
-She wants to lie down sleeping the whole day and not meet a human.
She wants Rajeeb to be happy.

For Rajeeb, she is what Calcutta this unknown city is all about.
For he knows he loves her.
As she wishes she would too.

.....And all while in her diary she writes-

"If only you came five years earlier.

If only I was not battle scarred and wounded.

If only love was just a word.

If only..."

The unknown man on River Padma-

2011-07-11T23:16:00.001-07:00

He is the man with jet black eyes and one week old stubble.
The main protagonist of a story unpublished.
He is the man who Tagore wrote about when he said-
..."I am listless,
I am a wanderer in my heart.

... I forget,
I ever forget,
that the gates are shut everywhere
in the house where I dwell alone!"

He is the man in this loneliness of a town who no one much knows about

Emilybari on the farthest shores of Sunderbans
The salty evenings of this humid place comes to an end on his windows.
Slowly in his spotless Bangla he writes-

"Shondha'r aalo jaino raat pohalo..
Aashbe je raati
diner bhayakranto moner
sheyi robe aashol shathi.."

Translated- "As the evening dies it feels like
the night has come to an end,
for the fearful in me
has the night as a real friend."

They call him Calcutta Man
Though he has been living here in the Sunderbans for twelve years now
He knows them all but none of them know him.
He has hundred and two poems and countless stories which no on shall ever read.

And now in the midst of an all too quiet night
he walks up to the river Padma as he has been doing everyday
and thinks how it reminds him of faces
that he knew a lifetime ago,
when he sat down with her by Hoogly
and they talked about traversing through the river,
the places he lived and moved away from
and how the world moves
but the night and the river stays with him in time.
And how no one else does

And then he walks back after hours
in the swaying misty winds of nights
he looks back one last time at her,
the river thinking of how it has been alone there for centuries
and how many infinite people have looked at her.
But never- never can anyone look at you like me
Nor can they make love to you as I do.

He walks away
thinking of
life and roads and city
and salt pepper lips and brown eyes and nothing.
He smiles
he does not want anything else
but the 'Now' that he possesses here
and perhaps just perhaps .. Her.

Evolution-

2011-07-09T03:26:00.001-07:00

1
And she does not look up
but keeps a guarded look at his movements
...he has an Ok walk
but his voice is not exactly
the way she had it thought of
and the way Maa is smiling
he might as well have been Sinatra.

And then
when everybody suddenly evaporates
of the room in an awkward moment
he tells her- "Aapni shundor"
and coyly smiles
She says-" Have you read, Wuthering heights?"
A question that fills him
with the a strange expression
a question that seems
perfectly normal to her
and he says slowly
disappointed at himself-" Naa."

Later Maa asks how was he?
And she says nothing.

2
And she looks at him
as if for the first time
removing betel leaves
for the shubho drishti
and he smiles at her
she instinctively smiles back
and the whole process is a blur after that.

He thinks she is the most beautiful thing on earth
She has not thought much

In their room
after he finally gets in
she has already slept
tired, drained
and he slowly caresses her
through his eyes
and smiles as she enters his life
Snoring

3
They have been to their honey moon in Italy
and she knows
that he can carry her home
while she has had one drink too many,
that he has cleaned the whole drawing room
where she puked it all out,
that he can make anti-hang over coffee
and looks at her smilingly
while she gulps it,
that he hums slow Robindro Songeet
while they walk together in Turin
and in one motion of his arm cover her up
when they cross the road.
That he patiently listens
while she explain Sistine Chapel to him
That when she has those bouts
where she misses her Maa-Baba a bit too much and cries
he sits next to her patiently
and offers a glass of water.
That he can practically handle
any electronic appliance and repair it.
That he is reading Wuthering Heights at nights
while she sleeps
beneath his pillow is open page 153.
That he will not touch her
until she feels alright about it.

And they return back from their trip from Italy.
Their marriage yet virgin.

4
And after their first office party since wedding
she does not feel altogether joyous.

And neither would she talk to him
while they return
and he says
in the same way he said
Aapni Shundor..
'Ki Holo'?
but she would not budge.

She sits quietly
looking outside
and remembers Mrs Mehta's slow taps
on his shoulders every time he said something funny.
Were they even funny?

She knows after their first meeting
that Mrs Mehta is despicable
and Mr. Mehta should keep an eye on her.

She looks at him with those cupcakes
of her eyes and says,
in full throttle anger
"Shono, ..I love you"

He smiles..and says..
"I know"

Of what must not be left un-said-

2011-07-08T10:08:00.001-07:00

Someday soon
Between you and me
I shall write an oasis of words

They shall be
as soft as
the palm of your hands
and as soulful as the notes
of your dulcet voice.

And somewhere there in between
I shall garden an island
where the sun rises in your temples
twilight dawns on your eyes
And the night draws
in the duskiness of your embraces
warming itself through your breaths on me
a country of unending springs
and slow drizzle of rains

There
I shall make it our home
where we live through time.

...And for now while we sit together
in our own cultivated dreams
underneath the tired moon
and a half drawn portrait
of a black-blue sky
that drapes us together
in our solitary different worlds.

I would like you to know
That the slowly calling dawn
Is just a beginning

Q&A-

2011-07-05T07:23:00.000-07:00

You know I have never quite realized
How you can contemplate Joyce's Ulysses?
Or even the fact
That you have two different names
For every human you know
How is it that it is always?
A little too much sugar in my coffee
That all the poems that you write
End in question marks?
And that you never write a poem on me?

I have never figured how carefree you sleep
Even when you have to lecture
Two hundred people next day?
How did you know?
That the only Tolstoy book
I never completed was Anna Karenina
cos' it was so friggin’ like me

And how you shall
Never keep any photographs
Of your childhood in Siliguri
Or that Salinger book.
Or that why you can never love me
Like I do... Just like that

.....

I call her Anna.
She is psychedelic pop
The happiness of
All Beatles songs put together
She is a mid-week holiday
She is the smell of winter evenings
And old leaves in open playgrounds

She is Karenina to my Vronsky
She is an afternoon nap
on a freshly cleaned bed-sheet and a happy dream.
She is an oaf who makes me smile
And yet she is ‘I shall pack your bags’.

She is like my first kiss.
But I cannot hold her back
Like Siliguri or 'catcher in the rye'

As I cannot love things or people
I can just write about them
And she is the metaphor of the story
Of my life
Though someday I shall
Put her into words
... Just like that

(And why do you always
Sweeten my coffee like
Puddings?)

Do not go-

2011-07-02T07:38:00.001-07:00

What if
I could hold you
into the island
of my palms
see you evolving
as a part of me
and take you with me
to all the places
we shall be

Talk to you
while
I have nothing left
to say

Like I am
but the only human
residing in the galaxy
of your name

and then one day
I shall open my hands
to let you see
what lies outside.

Perhaps
then you shall
want me
not to
let you go.

Of a Slow moving Moment-

2011-06-30T12:25:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it shall be one such moment
of muted breezes scented with the lurking rain
like an old friend that urges me to write a poem.

And out of the island
of this weary solitude you shall awake.

As I shall unveil the forgotten you
through layers
sketching you in the canvass
of my poetry.

And within the chasm
of my slow thoughts
I shall hold you

Like I hold the slow tapping
of your little fingers on my palm
your tilted eye brows when you worry
even your muffled laughs

Like I hold within me the faith in words
the charm of a verse
And the profound sense of fulfillment
that poetry provides me.

And in the midst of my all too crowded thoughts
shall you be like a smudged body
melted into soul and brewed into page.

And if I then offer you a nest,
Shall you reside as the lost sleep of my eyes?

Garden Inside

2011-06-15T12:18:00.001-07:00

Let me sow you
in the garden of my heart
O love.

Let me water
my warmth over
and then softly
let me be a breeze
to caress you through.

For you are
much more than
just a mere thought
or even an alluring body
you are a blossoming life
that shall grow for eternity

Not Today-

2011-06-11T05:22:00.001-07:00

If those eyes could talk
they must talk of things
things words can never form
like watching the slow breeze
kiss the river bed on late twilights
or the splattering of rains
on a crawling highway washing it of all its sins

The slow accompanying noise
that the ceiling fan makes while I write
The small mole between your lips and nose
The voice reminiscent of sarangi

For some solitary moments
I realize that I am lying beside you
And I open my eyes to a misty island
where mangrove forests grow over to heavens
And I lose myself in the forests of Sunderbans.

And yet I know am not lost
Though someday I shall wither away through time
and my memories of you
shall just remain troglodyte waves in this large cosmos

And they shall tear away the forest which reminds me of you
But not today, today I have all of it intact in me
And while it stays
I shall write you through all the commas and the full stops
And let you seduce me through my words.

Pebbles-

2011-06-07T06:33:00.001-07:00

For metaphors
am a pebble

Somedays
I stretch myself
through the river tides
in the Sunderbans
embracing the lands
claiming something
not lien but still
somehow mine.

On other days
am just a lone pebble
in the whole vastness of a river
am one in infinite
I move and bend in the curves
reflecting and refracting light
even in a drop I am
beholders delight

I survive both ways
and yet
I drown into me
until what remains
is just a remote lore
of myself.

Finding Me-

2011-05-08T10:25:00.001-07:00

In the evening mists
Somewhere between the laughter's of school children
Over the lands of the setting sun
Or even in the words of a song of languages unknown

I look for myself

As the evening passes by
Draped in a haze
I silently stay beneath a tree
Incognito, caressing my new found loneliness

In Salinger's Nine Stories page fifty three
In all the photographs that you took of me
In the silence of the evenings, in mystified seas
In every poem that you wrote with all last lines erased carefully
In that invisible great man that you wanted me to be
In your brooding poetic gaze
In our loves morbidity
And all that is yours left with me

If you ever do find
The human that was me
Let me know

I am still looking for myself.

How I Wish

2011-05-08T06:18:00.001-07:00

You know there are times when I see the sun-set somewhere far

And feel it on me like the warmth of your hands on my face.

For that moment I wish that this was the only memory I was left with.

All my poetry is prosaic compared to this foible emotion you manage to garner in me.

I wish I could weave my words along the setting sun and your hands filling the voids of my heart.

Like the way it did on a distant dusk in the grasses of Botanical Garden, Calcutta

As you lay beside me looking at the sky

I wish moments could be made into words and people into poetry.

I wish…

Inspirations and Loves-

2011-04-28T11:26:00.000-07:00

And now she sees herself
Meandering through pages
Well formed into words and very descriptive
Almost with Tolstoyic authority
Though with beauty that was never hers
She watches herself crawl out of the book
And glimpses of Anna Karenina in her
Head strong but funny
Guileless yet smart
And better read than she ever was
She makes the hero fall in love with her
Over and over again.
Like she did years ago
With a real man
And not the chief protagonist.

And he told her
That I shall make you immortal in time
And we shall live together
Slave of pages
As I need your inspiration more than your love.
And she laughed then.

She closes the book
And stays there for a moment while thinking
That life unlike books
Is always imperfect
Before retiring to her bed.
And in the end they live happily ever after.

....
Somewhere faraway
He too is reading his book
And midway he stops to think
Of the woman he sculpted
And smells her in the pages
Caresses her physically and waves through her-
I wish she was an imperfect fiction, he thinks
And drowns in the happiness of his smarts and pains.

In a Moment -

2011-04-11T06:14:00.001-07:00

And with every breath
a fragile moment ceases
and in this moment
I leave a thought
and catch a new one
a little breeze flows by
swamped by a windfull of them
a few leaves grown yellow fall
and in a distant space somewhere in mind
an almost forgotten memory crawls

Things change unseemly
like a blink of eyelids
a gulp of a bitter black coffee
a small twitch in your hands
as you remove mine
and a small heartbeat misplaced
unnoticed by any machine.

And in the next moment
I smile a little
the facade begins
you play with your fingers
looking at the ground
and both of us count
all the passing seconds
in the growing density between
now and then.

In a moment
small,
unobtrusive,
acknowledged not
we grow a million miles away.
Just a moment stays
Just a moment stays

Ghosts of Love-

2011-04-05T02:38:00.000-07:00

There is an old bench
Near the calm sea shore
Made of wood, rotten and thickets coming
On all of it galore

She sits on them on all nights
All nights and waits for him
They say on all nights he comes he does
Wearing a sailor tunic, a bow and a red trim

As youthful as ever he stays
While she holds him in her wrinkled hands
As he sprinkles kisses on her forehead
And also strokes her white-gray ancient hair strands

A few drops through her eyes fall
On his war insignia she wipes them caressing slow
Through all her tears he walks backwards
A few paces to the shore and bow

She does not stop him
She never will
He said I shall come the night he went
And all she does is believe him still

And he always does
And he always does

Tomorrow she shall wait again
On that old bench alone for her man brave
And like their nights of unending wrinkled love
These words shall be immortal as well on their grave.

The old bench awaits us.

His Wife

2011-04-01T11:09:00.001-07:00

Perhaps -Perhaps we never did meet.
For all I could remember is a faint black mole on your neck
And the early morning smell that you spread all day
...And the tiny ring on your nose which reflected sunlight
But I never saw amidst all the emotions
That you had an emotion that was bent on leaving.

And she says-
No I never infact.
The last thought in my mind
When I was about to leave for the mandap was You.

And I came
Just then
When she smelled of Kevada, Gajra
And not her morning freshness.
That mole was barely visible with that heavy benarasi.

-You know, I am perhaps
The most inconsistent lover ever.
And perhaps what I write is vaguely like Bukowski and Paz, not my own.
That I watch those French movies which depict too much sex for you
And that I can never make myself to understand your eyes
That you wanted to be loved and not made love to.
That mostly you gave in.
That you shall never like soccer the way I do.
That my love is not you but your body
But you have to trust me.

And someone thuds on the door.
Mamuni, it’s getting late.

Outside
Amal was waiting with his whole entourage of people.
Sitting in the mandap
Looking at the doors with nervousness
afterall he had never been in love before.

-You know, she says I am not the most beautiful women ever.
I am not Grace kelly as you like to think.
I look aweful in the mornings.
And I have mannerless sleeping habits
That I just watch old Hrishikesh Mukherjee stuff
That I like re-reading Jane Austin often.
That I don't know what the off-side rule is.
That your poetry seems self obssesed to me.
That I shall not sleep with you when you drink.
That I shall need you to cry on.
That I love you right now like no women can.
That I cannot marry Amal at any cost.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Amal took her to Prague for their honeymoon.
Amal did not even touch her for the first three months of the their marriage
as she said she could not.
That he burned the funeral pyre of her mother
as she had no son.
That he cried with her when she passed away.
That he took her to an Italian Opera
And then a soccer match and told her painstakingly that why that goal was not allowed.
That she told him that she loved me the first night.
That he just smiled and kept quite.
That he stood up for her when Dhrubo da remarked on her cooking.
That he was a teetotaler.
That he has bought her twenty M&B's till now.

That she has almost obliterated me from her memories.
That I am just a one page poem to her
That they caught my voice through the door
that day forced her to marry.

Now she looks at Amal when they are making love and says-
A woman can be wrong, you know.
And he still smiles.

As the summer walks by-

2011-03-31T12:06:00.000-07:00

In the baked nights of a melted April,
we shared a moon together
through the balcony of my heart

and a wind
with the salted waters and the burnished sun touched us
emotions poles apart like ours.

In my hands through your fingers
you drew rains and some love.
How we spent all those nights
quietly, surreptitiously into each other.

And now the Chrysanthemums have faded
and what remains is a dream half cooked.

You wanted a dream,
a dream to live
and I was a burnt log of summer
I held only ashes in my wilted palms.

Still through the left over meandering summer
into the hollow balcony I rummage through
perhaps to find you and rains and some love, I fail

You know
I Still look for the moment
when I let you go.

Strange Somedays-

2011-03-27T06:42:00.000-07:00

Somedays
I lean onto my windows
to find that it’s a bright lit dull evening

Where
the falling breeze and chirping birds
saunter through to home emptying the stash of the shore

And
the portrait that of my windowpane
has nothing left no words of beauty but a quite dim dusk

Somedays
I realize that there's nothing to be written or told
but wilderness and a heart that is left so to live and respire in cold

And
it is then that I meet you over a smudged line called horizon
with the drowning sun and the little whispering shadow of moon

And
slowly around your ears in a circle I whisper
that I need you unlike any other metaphor I can ever create
that I need you for love and otherwise

It is not love Dearest!-

2011-03-23T22:06:00.001-07:00

1
That strange Bengali lyrical English accent of yours
Which I claimed to have hated, to my friends
But fell in love with, the first time I heard
And literature became the motto of my life and everything else

You even introduced me to Mrs Mukherjee , your wife
And still I knew that it was me always
Because the next day you read out loudly, Garcia Marquez
“Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.”
And then looked straight at me

And I know that it is always like that a cliché as they say
That a man who was early middle aged
Talked less
Yet could fill whole lives into few words
When his odd writings were published in dailies here and there
Who could never let go off his stubble as if it was permanent
Who taught literature
Shall be cause of a lot of first loves
And so you were

But then most of them haven’t seen the cliché that is you.
You had the longest fingers I ever saw even by your tall standards.
Long-ish hairs and an ovoid face with a little bald patch easily hidden and you said aloud-
“ I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.”
And you were Yeats.

Poetry was almost porn for you as I knew. Like your voice for me.

2
I saw you as a twenty eight year old too, Framed
You still had that five day old beard
And reminded me of Che even Rob-Di-Nero.
It was your college office
And then you left without even letting me know
I wasn’t important enough when I think of it now
And months and years and a life went.
I read your obit in the statesman today
And exactly as only you can do
It had one of your unread poems

“If I could offer my love as the fee
Or even as my heart; my naked plea
But my heart and love even breathe you dear
How can I present you to unjust mockery?

Hold it close it’s the my last recourse
My thoughts my words and all my dreams
I offer them to you these are all I have
Leave me claimed with sane insanity.”

3
Kolkata in late December could be described as marginally hot by your European standards
But it still gave me shivers to see you
And when you passed by me through rows
I could smell that thing you had as perfume it smelled of winter twilight's in Kent or Cantia as you said.
You know I spent my honeymoon in south England
And my husband was flabbergasted at my choice
I read Yeats at times even now
Just when the world gets too much to bear
I do not read much these days
And that day after five years of not seeing me, you did see me but comfortably ignored
I know this too

4
It was early May and I can still see you drenched in rains with a smile
Tall, slender you were a poem alive
You stood by my door
And then I realized that it is a hallucination
That you are gone
That am married have my kids
That it was an infatuation to a man who lived poetry
That summer’s day shall not be Shakespeare anymore to me
That we would’ve never got along (age difference)
And moreover I can never be a mistress
That you did call me three years from Delhi on my birthdays
That you did get the love letter I wrote you in the second year of your DU faculty days
And that you said it is not love dearest
And that afterall you would still believe that today-
It is not love dearest
it is not..

Lost Philosophy-

2011-03-19T23:17:00.000-07:00

Once in a quaint lazy afternoon you told me that you wanted to write a story a story that shall follow no script, no beginnings or even an end. A story which can be read and ended wherever possible. And I laughed at you.
You said we’ve come to accept mediocrity as means of creativity into our world and your laugh is just an example of it. Perhaps I shall not be read, maybe they would not understand my story but I shall pen it. You know why, because I do not confirm to the epidemic averageness that fills our world like ether.

I said hopeless, all the while laughing and then added you’re part of the world spirit -the Geist as Hegel said. You’re no greater than the whole sum you stubborn fool. Now I realize, why should a story follow a script when life does not?

You told me it was not my kohl filled eyes, my aquiline nose or even my seductive yet soothing voice (your words) that made you fall but the fact that I knew my philosophy. You made me laugh.
I said, I still cannot fathom that why am in your arms. You said Weiltgeist, the world spirit sweetheart.

All of them said that I was very beautiful. That my eyes were not eyes and that they compared me to a summer’s day thanks to the Bard of Avon.
And you, it was as if you could see through me. Later you gave me your own theory that excessive beauty made you afraid and that you could never bring yourself to judge a book by its cover. The first time you kissed me was when we talked about 'subjective idealism' of Berkley perhaps the moment I uttered the sentence.

I asked you once why do you value this knowledge so much? And you in your own Bogart-ish style with a burning cigarette and that slow but unnerved voice said that Sophia means wisdom and -phile is lover. You love your wisdom and so do I. How many people care to ask, who am I?
And then to know it read what great men and woman before have said about it. And..

.......................................................................................

The doctor came looked at both of them and said-
Mam I have to feed him now. Both pair of eyes looked at him and she said, Okay I shall leave then.
He just looked on as if he could see through them. And she kissed him and went.

Later when the doctor fed him he looked at the doctor like he knows her and said-
“Was she Helen or Blessed Hildegard of Bingen?"
The doctor laughed and said-
" Yesterday she was Bonolata Sen."
And cleaned the spilled food with an old piece of cloth.

A Midsummer Night's Lost Day-

2011-03-14T21:33:00.001-07:00

Am not the fondest of summers
the sun sings much too loudly these days
its symphony of lost moments in fire

The pavements cry
with a wilted sigh
and melt into the moments of a mirage

The evenings are the little children
that annoy and take you back to all lost moments
where smile was the flavor of every air you breathed in

And unknowingly you walk on to the roads
of the old city
where you ran along running buses
and sat beneath mango tress

And I lose the thread of time slowly
how did we let it go?
how did we let us wither?
like the snowflaked caps of a distant land of desires

The snow bled away and the summers stayed
but sometime just sometimes
the sun gets lost
while it rains
a slow hymn
of lost love

dripping and filling life
into a little daisy
called midsummer night’s dreams
far away
far far away

Next Morning-

2011-03-14T21:32:00.001-07:00

glimpses of the waking sun
through the mountains of your cleavage, rise
i touch the morning rays
caressing the warmth of perspiring skin
amidst your drooping sighs

In My Time of Dying-

2011-03-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

A lazily laid out Goanese summer slept through
amidst the saltwater sleep inducing breezes
as the eternally awake sun peeped into the black glassed windows
and he jokingly said- "Look at it, the voyeur bloody fire ball."
Mitchell looked outside Nikhil's open and her closed eyes for the first time
feeling strangely uncomfortable as if, as if it really was watching her.
Thinking for the first time of her unabashed half naked body
And smiled-" Thankfully I still have clothes on some of them."
And Nikhil tore open the last remnants of lingerie from Mitchell.

The sun meanwhile outside her windows looked on
it had seen Nikhil waiting for two hours outside the villa
and when everybody went
he thudded at her doors seven times before she opened
all the while knowing who was out there.
The door opened and she slapped him
and he with all the brute force held inside for hours and days now
kissed her and she slapped him and he kissed her and again and again
after four repetitions of this
she finally forced herself on him
for the next twelve minutes they made love
we know this as the music player played "In My Time Of Dying" start to finish
though the time felt way less than the mentioned length but way more exhilarating
mostly because the connotations of the song
and the fact that she was about to be married to Edward

Now he says- " Let us elope. Let us get married."
and she looks at him and smiles, wordlessly says-" It is impossible, you know."
Nikhil thinks of the bespectacled and short but undeniably good looking Edward
who shall exchange vows with her tomorrow
and do whatever he just did now to her
but that would be sanctified wouldn't it.

Nikhil pierces his face into her
tasting the Goa seas in her body
and she on her part thinks
that she shall not see the sunrise tomorrow
and this must, must be painfully alive
sapping the bitterness out of life.

And sun leaves.
In a while Nikhil too will
with a promise to get away from all of it tomorrow
and she shall break another promise tonight.
She knows he will die inside and the sun doth lives on endlessly

Sly Ole’ Son Of a Gun-

2011-03-04T23:19:00.001-08:00

Nilotpal is deep into Shrabonti

like the toy that you so wanted to buy as a kid but could not somehow

Nilotpal starts in his mind one, two, three

and only if she will look at me by the count of five, he sighs

unlike any film that he has seen, she never does

Tonight Nilotpal will give up on food again and also his daily peg of single malted scotch

He does that on days he sees her standing in the bus stop

Tonight he will write a half baked poem again and dream of kissing her

like that actor kissed that girl in the movie he saw last Saturday, with tongues and all.

He shall tell her that he is all love if only she will look at him once.

And prima facie he is not fat or a poet but just in love

Shrabonti is down and depressed

his guy is not answering her calls once more

why does love need to be so damn complicated

if only she could get off all her responsibilities

and just swim like she desires at times

if only she would be loved the way she would like to be

if only he would French kiss her and tongue

and at such moments she wants

to go out and sleep with the next guy she meets

some stranger without inhibitions perhaps

perhaps that guy, that guy she occasionally sees on the bus-stop

and now she wonders about the contours of Nilotpal’s face but only momentarily

then realizes it would all be just a facade just a revenge on her guy,

nothing else.

But she knows

Tomorrow she will be far more forthright at the stop

Tomorrow she will look at him and smile a bit

just for the dignity to her own thoughts

Nilotpal is sleeping and in his dreams Shrabonti looks at him.

He wakes up startled and thinks of how he is wasting all his thoughts on a girl

He knows nothing about.

He will now get his life straight.

Shrabonti for her sake shall muddle his life again.

--------------

And far off in another world I hum along-with Ella Fitzgerald-

"It's that ole devil called love again

Gets behind me and keeps giving me that shove again

Putting rain in my eyes

tears in my dreams

and rocks in my heart.

It's that sly old son of a gun again."

And laugh off.

am

2011-02-18T09:07:00.001-08:00

am a morning cup of Malabar coffee
and The Hindu editorial peruse
am that old dilapidated crumbling building at chowringee

am illiterate with computers
but cook great finger lickin' biryanis
and am always on my way to happiness

am page four forty three
the postscripts of Kafka's diaries, unread
and almost all Salinger’s short stories, misinterpreted

am that guy you always feel
you've seen somewhere before
and am not that noticeable in a crowd of ten or less

am inside a cocoon
and i like it here
dark and peaceful

am a full moon on the night
it rained cats and dogs
even the last leaf left in autumn

am the hug of reassurance that is
absent when wanted like hell
and hazel eyes beneath costly ray-bans

am disliked and loved both
without reason or rhyme
am a fake multiple orgasm used to please others

am, i wish i knew you two years ago,
am half made, but left
a distorted paper boat flowing

am not made to love
and i can't love you
like that, you know

but i can write about it,
i shall.

Completing Me-

2011-02-09T08:29:00.001-08:00

And when you come
if you do,
You shall see

That I write
...half poems
in three fourth prose
and a quarter of metaphors.

Somehow all my poems
await something to accomplish
like I do.

A word to rhyme,
a metaphor to consummate,
an end to the poetry
and all of you ... just you
to complete me.

-Raj Shekhar Sen

Oft Adultery-

2011-02-07T09:56:00.001-08:00

It was before I became Dr. Mukherjee- One of the strictest professor in Calcutta University

Also known among students as the ol’ hag with cats

Before I had troubles walking up to your Park Circus flat by stairs fourth floor

Before you started calling me the eternal spinster

Before I got a gold medal in MA from Calcutta University and later a Phd

For my thesis on Enid Blyton’s work and its effect on the children

Before I read Albert Camus and understood that happiness is fleeting

Before my first kiss

Before I knew what love was

Before I turned sixteen

That was the time when I met you

And I started loving-

Rains and its tiny drops on my face

And good books and rhyme free poetry

And men with a taste in literature

And a sip of the Pinot Noir wine after nine past fifteen, your gift

And your occasional taps on my hairs and shoulders but platonic

And the way you love Di with all your heart

And sang-“Fools Rush In” on your anniversaries

And your recently gained oft repeated three Kgs

And all of you

You came smelling all Old Spice Lagoon

You sat eating nothing amidst a plethora of edibles

I had read pride and prejudice then

And we had seen your pictures before you

You were soft spoken, a little hurried while talking

Cute in a dusky Bengali sort of way with a baritone which did not quite fit in

And even your lame attempts at humor made me smile

You were the quintessential Mr. Darcy to me

Who came for the wrong sister

And then

You asked me- Do I know Noddy or have heard Blyton

I could not say anything

After a while I said “Elizabeth” and you must’ve thought I was queer

Later you said that I was blushing as if I came to see you

I wish you did

And it was then I decided that I shall read all of Enid Blyton

And even now

At this moment

Looking at you unconscious

After your first heart attack

I can still see what made me love you

And I wish

Perhaps!!-

And relive all your gentle taps on me

Hold my crying sisters hand a little more tighly

Thinking of how I am a frequent adulterer

Wish me a word

2011-02-03T07:33:00.001-08:00

Wish me a word my love
and I shall spell Our
life,
love,
death
and all in between appurtenances..

Will You-

2011-02-03T07:28:00.000-08:00

Gift me
two of your poems
and a plain old tattered metaphor

I shall
make your verses
my wings,
your metaphor
my heart

And
like all your poetry
I shall travel the sky,
all my sky
a couplet

Will you..

Tumi Aamar Moner Moton-

2011-02-01T12:28:00.001-08:00

Tumi aamar moner moton,
kintu tumi shey to naa.
Tumi to shriti'r bagan'e
krishnochura ekti phul.

Aami tomaye ronge gondhe prem korbo.
Aalo'r moton opekkhakrito thakbo
tobe phul tulbo na.
Shokal'er aalo shudhu amaar jonne to nei.

Aami jani tumi shey na
Aami jani eita prem na

English-

You are like my soul's song
But you are not her
You are a daisy in the garden of my memories
You are a delonix

I shall love you in colors and smells
And await you like the morning lights
Though shall not displume you,
you are not meant too
The morning light is not just for me, dear.

I know you are not her.
I know this is not love, that I crave for.

Life Shall Not Rhyme-

2011-01-21T03:18:00.000-08:00

Now
He just lives
In a black and white jungle
In the hinterland

Amidst dry winters and sticky sun

Where men are God-less
And worship
Rice
And in front of a father
A son dies

A poor man’s wife
Is just an upper caste whore
Two and two are yet not four

Where
Death wishes
Are the only prayer
And at a blank white paper and dark blue pen
He stares

And you ask why he isn’t penning love poems now?
He now knows life shall not rhyme
He now knows life shall not rhyme

Green Leaves Painted Death-

2011-01-21T03:17:00.002-08:00

Paper weight love, Ash tray romances
Sunday morning news paper, Saturday night TV
Sex

And through all this she smiles
Botox smiles, Cosmetic hearts

He bought her for hundred dollars a month
And a ring of gold
For life

He spews love
She is still a greenhorn
Official whore

Yeah and every night
She paints the dead leaves
Green
As if they’ll breathe again
And relive

All Me

2011-01-21T03:17:00.001-08:00

There’s a lake or a river, am not quite sure. It has its acquaintance with just one shore. The other side touches the sky afar. And on full moon nights it kisses the stars. While in love with stars it swims joyously. But the one shore river shall never meet the sea. The river is me.
It is all me.

Stealing Poems-

2011-01-21T03:16:00.001-08:00

I steal poems, like goods
And then I live in them
For a while
Happily
Like a non paying tenant
...…
One of these days
I shall call you
To my new rainbow abode
Let me color home iridescent now

Life, Death and That Something else

2011-01-18T05:47:00.001-08:00

On some nights, I dream poetry
Of winter greens, White lilacs and perfect “C” smiles
On other nights I live vegetable
Breathing in and out, Ink-less
And on still other nights, I die
Like a forgotten footnote in the desert of dense chronology.

His Best Stories

2011-01-11T00:13:00.000-08:00

As they say
It rained on that windy day
Cold winds and a colder heart
They took their vows of never being apart.
At the old cathedral across the meadow
Underneath an unknown writer's phantasmal shadow

And in distance he sat
Short, round, bespectacled and fat
Looking at the woman the would be wife
The answer to all the pain
Of his spectral souls strife
Ans all the love of his failed life

On the night with the winds knocking on his door
He wrote a story of a wedding on a sunny shore
Where a woman kissed a man monocle
And since they lived happily ever after
-He called the story
"The same wall a little mend"
His stories unlike him
Always had a happy end

Circa 79,

2011-01-08T20:52:00.001-08:00

Protruding nose sideways
and a wrung smile
Bejeweled in yellow frames.
I can still smell you all over me
mogra and all her friends of the night.
Well formed salt pepper lips.
And cheeks none too large
so as to seem intruders
but like well loved neighbors.
Small eyes like poetry written all to quickly
though which came out too well
for the writer to be surprised.

And then she comes
puffed eyes,
over dressed,
Nineteen going on Thirty.

As if to convince me
of her promiscuity
pointing at you in the wall
- Am I her?
Can I be?

And I Sigh,
on moments my dear
on moments.

Mere AfterwordS-

2011-01-06T21:18:00.000-08:00

Tanima lives happily with Adam somewhere in Milan.
We shall not go to exact location, a privacy thing.
But somewhere is information enough.
Adam writes poetry almost with the same vigor which made her like him.
He writes more romance now.
She lives less romance now, perhaps.

Sayantan has only read one poem throughout his life.
And that one was the puffed eyed girl called Tanima.
And he still re-reads her in his mind at times.

Tanima thinks about that almost love that she had with Sayantan, at times.
With closed eyes and tight fists.
For Adam, Sayantan is perhaps some demi-god in Hindu pantheon to whom Tanima talks to at night.
Tanima does not know that she sleep talks.

She and Adam make love every alternate night as Adam stays busy these days.
On other nights she cuddles up Sayantan in her mind and talks.
Closed eyes, tight fists.
For sayantan life must be a lot more than a PhD from NYU.
And that lot more is just the five feet tiny palms-Tanima.
He has met a few girls with those looks and the same tastes but they are mere caricatures for her.
He has insomnia.

Adam is working on a new book called Love and Paraphernalia’s.
Tanima is still that cute brown skinned girl that makes him truly international.
He loves her though, he thinks.
She loves him though, she knows.
Closed eyes tight fists.

Tanima still maintains that year with Sayantan was just a ‘rebound thing’.
She says this with tight fists and closed eyes.
For Sayantan things stopped that night in Bombay Airport.
For Sayantan there is no afterword.

All Things-

2010-12-22T03:19:00.000-08:00

Of all things
Socialism,
Sicilian defense,
Sunday afternoons,
The Ninth Symphony,
Salinger,
The Voluptuous Mrs Chaterjee of the fourth floor,
Caucasian Chalk Circle
And Amy Goodman
Of all things said and done
I fell for you.

Failed Foreplays

2010-12-21T06:20:00.001-08:00

-“Some moments like endless nights,
Nights bereft of days humiliated by the moonless sky
And all that is dark stay.”
......

Rippon Street- The third floor
when you are over
with your daily chore

Breathe and let go off a heave
think of those days
of rainbow skies, marmalade eyes,
and a lifetime of sighs.

We held hands; pecked
letting silence reign over us
it was December all over again
perhaps the Christmas week.
Snows in Darjeeling
Of madras rain.

And for that moment,
just then
be meek.
Think of me
and that ‘almost kiss’
in your garage
let some pleasure reek.

- Was it an awful almost kiss?
She says.
......

-“Some moments like endless nights,
Nights bereft of days humiliated by the moonless sky
And all that is dark stay.”

And round and round You go
round and round them
and more…

Insert Poetry

2010-12-17T21:55:00.000-08:00

On days of sudden surges she’s Scarlet o’ hara or Rebeca .

Mostly she can be any of Kana Mitra, Shiuli Das or Moon-Moon.

On those days she writes poetry like Keats.

Only that she likes Byron or Neruda more, she confirms.

And all her poems make her cry of which only I have been privy to

Like a spectator though, not a participant.

-“These poems are what resonate in my mind on most days in work”.

-“Not that there is anything else to think of” I chide

-“Not much time to think too” she laughs.

I don’t know her exact name. I don’t know her most.

I doubt it has something to do with P as that tattoo shall suggest you too.

I know though that her birthday is on Sixteenth June and her mother died that day some years later.

She has no history as she jokes, only a succession of presents.

But she loves history.

She once recited ‘Cleopatra’s Date Tonight’ one of her writes, a comedy this time on one of her playful days.

She loves Italian food and Roshogolla.

She is a closet communist. Fantasizes Che Guvera

She reads quality literature and has hard bound covers of many.

Her favorite book is little woman.

She has been Bonolata Sen for me on one of such days.

She loves me for my love of good literature and women, only platonically though she maintains.

She has those eyes like unexpected evening rains and can speak fluent Bengali if she wishes too.

With a voice like an early winter morning or raspberry.

She has a mole in the right side.

Her smile is all what I wanted to be ten years ago but could not.

She is all my failures conglomerated.

She offers the best blow-job in town. She is client satisfaction guaranteed.

And according to a very learned customer, a poetry to enter too.

Living Death Wish-

2010-12-05T10:24:00.000-08:00

and if I am allowed
a death wish
spoken,
written,
held -
it shall be
drop of your smile as my epitaph
sprinkle of your eyes felt on me
in the soil beneath
my hand held in your hands, eternal
will let you breath in me.

What Goes Around Comes Around-

2010-12-02T10:50:00.000-08:00

Tania shall never know that Birat loved her since the eighth grade.
She is mostly confused between Birat and Shantanu and who’s who they are always together
She does not know that he just looks at her throughout the class and it has been the way from school to college.
Nishtha and Rajeev have been making love since the last two hours
And Rajeev is still thinking about that chance encounter with Prodipta.
She has been in his mind ever since- walking stealthily, not recognizing him, talking to that newspaper guy and naked.
He loved her during college but she was a classified bitch

Suchishmita is still waiting for Rajeev to come and pick her from office and he is as usual late
She wonders how much has Rajeev changed but then relaxes thinking he gave her flowers last week
Rajeev picks her up and is still guilt ridden
His flowers for Nishtha were seen by Suchi in the back of car
He had to pretend they were for her
He thinks she might have a clue that he is having an affair
It’s just undressed passion he knows
She blabbers all the way just to ease herself up
Rajeev has just Prodiptas face in his mind, aargh!
Nishtha still does not know if she loves Rajeev or if even he loves her
She is reading original Romeo-Juliet these days

It’s France and Shantanu is walking through Lyon
He has never been that lonely
He thinks about Suchishmita, Birat and College Street
Suchishmita is his brother Rajeev’s wife, but he can’t stop thinking about her
Birat wrote a poem ten years ago for Tania
And is still waiting for a sign from her that she too loves him
Tania never fell for a guy since higher secondary

“Let me look at your eyes
A drawn white light
Like my name on your lips O love
Make me breath in the paradise.”

Shantanu loves Suchi boudi
Since the day he came back from that trip to Kodaikanal
And he saw Nishtha in Rajeev’s arms
He never told Suchi Boudi
But since then everytime she smiles at Rajeev
It kills him. And he loves her more

Prodipta cannot love ever since her father did that to her
Tania thinks Prodipta acts ways to cocky
Prodipta never talks of her family. Even during Christmas holidays
Tania thinks she looks like Sophia Loren with her curling eyelashes
Tania thinks a lot about her
Prodipta knows intuitively that Tania loves her and she doesn’t mind
She is Kolkata and all that is calm
She can write the best romantic poems
She strangely does not hate her dad.

Unlike Nishtha who has never written a poem albeit one
That too with me. Many years ago in Digha
She is not afraid of heart breaks
She is the best cook I have ever known
I sleep at her place whenever I feel like
I have seen her in that blue night gown gifted by Rajeev
I have seen her in my dreams
I know Rajeev is just a passing fancy
I wish I had loved her.
I wish…

Two Days Later-

2010-11-29T06:57:00.000-08:00

He is in a dilapidated lodge in Allahabad now
“What is the name of the lodge.” He thinks
But he can’t
He just imagines Dibendu making love to her
And ejaculates-A scream

Dibendu is reading his letter meant for Mrinalini
And crying
He posts every poem he writes and posts at Mrinu’s address
This is his revenge he believes
“You can abandon me but can never your words.” She said.

He never thinks of going back to that place
A city that turned into a woman, eventually
Pair of eyes penetrates him through the balcony of 34 Rippon Street
And the rains, a perfect cliché.
But unlike all clichés he never did look back
If he did he would’ve known that she fell unconscious
He can still at nights listen to falling tears. The sound overpowers
Doctor has given him medicines for his insomnia

Sound of tears, a metaphor.
Two day after that day
Sounds of shahnai and Aguner Poroshmoni song
Pierced through that place he believes
But he’s wrong
Time stood still on Rippon Street
Two days after never came.

At certain moments he forgets his route back to Kolkata
This is his phobia these days
And he pens a poem
Tears apart the pages
And he can remember his way back as clear as a day
“You love your poems more than me.” She said

He has written and tore two poems a day
Tomorrow he shall move southwards.
And he plays Love by Lennon in his I-Pod.

Let it flow

2010-11-17T10:13:00.001-08:00

Life flows-

Like winters underneath the quilts

legs stretched and thoughts too,

with the vanilla smell of the newly washed covers and home.

Morning sun through your windows

drenching the face,

coffee and the newspaper

to watch through the balcony.

And to walk the greens in the evenings

through leaves-

dead yellow and brown

with strange unexplained smell

and stranger sounds resonating somewhere far

of what you shall never know.

Now only those leaves seem alive.

But winters go, you leave home.

The poem that you wrote

with each words written and rewritten

and then read aloud

to make it sound perfect

but torn

not to let anybody else see you in them

to hide yourself

in all those myriad personalities

you weave for yourself and you shall be.

Like the words that once filled life

names that were not true and yet were

like people who gave it to you

saccharined and all

inducing smiles.

But those words

ran to be heard by someone

you would never know and still envy.

Some dreams.

felt but forgotten

seen and touched

with lingered smiles

concatenating truth and a lot of fiction

that you think of years down the line

but dreams of just that night

mortal bright.

And it shall walk away too,

like the tiny fragments of moments

that zip pass

no matter

what thread you tie

to pull them back

to stick to

to grow into you

it shall .

Life flows, does it not.

Love is just a word afterall.

From Journals Incognito

2010-11-15T08:18:00.001-08:00

The fan makes creaking sounds with the nuts and bolts of the bed in unison,
He lies on one to gaze into the other undisputed
The slow hums from the next room are incoherent voices in television
A strange music is invented.

Trains and buses letting him in three towns in ten day.
Town to town into unknown locales, he sprawls.
Places that were names come with life and with each come a prosaic word play.
As if the hovel filled country is some heaven sent virgin. He has caressed them all
..You are a male chauvinist she said then.

Carving landscape into words to put to papers.
Eating cartographic details
He swallows unpalatable spices and flavors.

The music goes on, he smiles looking onto the rotating instrument ‘Mozartize’ itself.
He has acquired this new fetish for coining words,
Words whose meanings shall be held just by his self.
Like his life which he has cleaved onto, with every footstep that can come to him murdered.

And he smiles
He has won over time
He has lost over his past
He has written a new diary entry last night
A poem is undressed.
He is making love to the town.
He shall grab a bus tonight, for a new unnamed.

Only if she knew he was..

Machu-Pichu Assortments

2010-10-27T01:25:00.000-07:00

1

A Kafkaesque silence persists,

While the light through that afternnoned window

Brightens your sallower expressions.

Distortions at its best.

I play with faces around evading that bright lit pained face.

Love walks, like some face you remember but fail to recognize.

And love stays though shabby, in tatters.

The slow hum of fans resonates with the silence and our breaths

You’ve said it, just like you talked about everything,

Like skirts or reggae music or ray.

Like love was, but a phase that passes.

Like being quite does the trick for me.

And you walked away.

I stayed waiting for two more coffees.

I stayed waiting forever.

They forgot to serve me the coffees

2

-I’ve completed Guveras various biographies

Even read canto general,

Octopus’s garden by Ringo Starr seemed futile

And the university was too painful to go to again.

They had a burger joint in our university premises and I hated it,

Ironically they called it Uncle Sam.

I even wrote a poem, “To live, to die”.

Later it was published in one of those assortments.

I thought I regained life.

I thought I started my circle.

You smelled of jasmine.

3

-“Hindi movies must be seen to get the idea of rural or semi- urban Indian mindset. “

The words faintly touched my ears I was somewhere else already.

Niagara it was I guess and you were next to me quietly.

I had made love to your shadows.

“Bengali movies are good somewhat,

Ray for example.

And Breakfast at Tiffany’s was vulgar.”

All this comprised of what you told me in that dinghy we called our college canteen.

Ray always accentuated Indian poverty, I believed. Who cares!

I was supposed to be a great listener. It wasn’t enough though.

You had big eyes and they turned even bigger when you talked interest.

I loved you and thought of you wordless, garbles.

I almost always failed to register my point, even when you decided, London.

4

To Live, To Die

As they shall tell you

That he walks through nights sound asleep

And he talks the way he did mostly.

They shall be a testimony to the fact

That I have been a man of brevity and not a man of misery.

Would that be sufficed?

Would that make you smile in the snowflakes that you reside?

You must know that to live is to die, love.

For every moment is a witness

For us to that slow saunter towards it

The death the ugly travesty.

But look at you and I,

We ignorant

Laughed, joked, mocked and then loved.

Futile it was all futile.

This is not poetry, but revenge.

Now it looks a Nerudaish pastiche.

5

-The idea of Guvera as the eternal hero is a myth; it would’ve been the same if Castro died instead.

You were adamant like you were always

When you convinced me that Ringo Starr wasn’t a true blue Beatle after all

Or that sandwich, burgers are source of spreading capitalism

That you had to go to England to understand firsthand what English literature was.

That you had to leave me in the process.

That the circle of your life was incomplete within me.

That love is just a four lettered word, like Dylan said

I never got any of your points but was too egotist and too shattered to say my heart then.

6

-You shall find one Indian atleast anywhere you go,

they are all over even in Peru, I was told.

I did find one

After fifteen years

And some kilometers from Machu Pichu in a coffee shop,

From a few thousand miles from where there was the genesis of it all Kolkata.

After twelve failed novels yet to be published

And a secure position as a medical journal editor.

After Guvera was seen in a bikini

And Ringo starr had revealed his fifteenth album.

After eighteen kilo extra body fat.

You were there with someone who hopefully had the same views;

The kids looked almost like you.

And I saw a twenty year old me too, smiling at time.

I passed by you like two strangers do.

You looked at me or you didn’t

I don’t know after the first minute I had lost the courage.

The circle had completed.

Shakespearean Tragedy Carved In Thee

2010-10-16T04:54:00.001-07:00

And talkless come to me; like a flotsam through waves, comes ashore in night,

Love, like a moon loves the skies, quietly, through eyes, refulgent bright.

For once let not the veneer of words

Take away the opalescence

That is created by our silence, colored in gray.

Let that be ephemeral, our love

A fleeting love story.

Be in love, then loose each other,

Sundering the life force of the poetry.

Let me founder into senility,

From the dreams of my words

In between the lines eek thyself to me,

Turn into me; let me create thee in a Shakespearean tragedy.

Let It be me

2010-10-16T04:52:00.000-07:00

Eyelids closed curtains drawn,
thy sleepy living eyes an oxymoron,
in the midst of moons daily stroll,
i wake up just to see you in deep,
perhaps your dreamful moving eyelids
are penning a picture or poem of me,
or maybe the façade is just me.
Let it be me.

Autopsy Of A Poet

2010-08-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

1

Somewhere at Dharmotala, Kolkata. His diary said.

The night has slowly crept in, unknocked though the time has stopped for me. I have been looking at nothing since the last two hours sitting in this obscure footpath my eyes fixed intently at a void. Rains douse me, let me scribble my swansong.

Rains shall go on forever,

Drop by drop into the streets

Onto the sky through my eye,

In the midst of the disarray in fragments,

Shards,

Like a nox without twilight, shall I lie.

Breathing morbidly to the winds,

Looking towards nothingness, at a distant void,

Nowhere.

The days shall live with nights and their friends.

Heart too shall grovel.

But the poet shall die.

He called this write, “The Death of a poet”. It is the last written page in his diary and it is timed an hour before. And he wrote the lyric of Seasons in the sun, but stopped after three lines.

2

Diary- Our friends came, to solace I sat with them nodded after every two odd minutes and guised to listen. You would’ve been proud of my acting.

An eerie silence

Is eked by the muted noise of the fan,

A stereo plays faraway in dissonance

Vehicles passing by blare.

I listen to it

At the silences I stare.

All of this my mind shall pen,

Put into words

Form a verse

But like a recurring tape

Or a flowing lake

The voices in me are all hers.

Words carved into years,

Molded into moments

To be tailed to my memory.

She calls me but I can’t cross.

Oh the pains all numb,

Self is but calloused and dreary.

Beneath it- “I wrote it while watching the wedding album, the picture after our jai mala. I shall name it, “Hangover”. Don’t worry I am not drunk. Haven’t been in a year.”

3

Perhaps a lonely old leaf

Has flown from the tree,

It must be,

As I always think,

Your smiles are so

Green.

Remember

It is you

Who says,

You must buy a new tuxedo, before I die.

And those new drapes you chose

Advocating they’ll last a year even two.

No, how can it be you.

It’s me they don’t know it yet,

Please don’t cry, here peacefully I lie.

Insurance cover you,

You shall learn to handle banks.

You are a better driver

Then I claimed.

Hold back your tears, it’s just me.

It’s not you, it’s just me.

I had to pen it in haste, it came to me then and I cannot take a pen and paper at a funeral especially where am the center. Look I wrote a poem, it is not impossible after you.

In his diary he scribbled all of it after his penning and named it, “My Death- Your Death”.

4

They say he published it, in the magazine he worked with. It’s name is, “Colors of life”

let us color love in whites

and give it some hopes of a better next day

always,

let’s make hope sparkle and shimmer in gold,

so that we value it and treasure it

forever,

let’s make loss a dull morose yellow

dull but still lit so as to remind us

that the end shall always lurk close and lets all live to fullest.

and patience

let us color it in iridescence

so that its beauty always holds us close to it in our hearts

and with patience shall we go through,

pain.

And in his diary he says, this one paid all the hospital bills.

5

It is written without any pre-note just a few calculations are done in this page perhaps grocery, this is the first written poem that we found in his diary.

Horizon was enclosed in the clouds of rain,

the texture was immodestly green,

but then you happened,

walking by in that fuchsia hued garb of yours

and lent the panorama a touch of perfection,

or was it just me.

I followed you by my eyes till I could discern you

from those clouds faraway, your abode as they were.

Years ago I saw a marble statue of Aphrodite,

my heart drew it today and it turned out draped in fuchsia.

Beneath it though he has written,” shall you grace it by naming it, I shall give you options , “The First Ever” or “Hopes of your Love”. And he drew a heart under it.

- This is in the next page written in haste perhaps, he calls it, “Birthday”

Words flow

as if a river has fused thoughts into me

am I a poet,

perhaps I have capitulated

to those vision my soul paints,

the prose are still inchoate.

6

We found it at his home; it was kept in a closet with a lot of jewelry possibly bridal. A neatly folded page of the same diary.

Would you hold me when even my shadows go,

walk with me when its been an uphill tread,

Would you smile reassuringly

when you see tears swell my eye.

Would you be my.

Would you caress me with your eyes although thousands are around,

hold me close when melancholy clouds arrives,

would you take me through all my days

weather they are sad or wry,

would you be my.

Would you watch the night sky lying on the roof snuggling near,

and just embrace me without inhibitions

saying millions of things by your eyes

forever together we shall there lie,

would you be my.

Would you be the pillar I've wanted all along,

the power which helps me face the world

Would you still love me with all my failures

not letting our love die,

would you be my.

...Just mine..

Beneath it is written,

“PS- I’ve never tasted something as delicious as you.”

Epilogue-

The police wrote in their investigation-

Cause of suicide could not be ascertained.

Case Closed.

In The Dreams Of An Old Man

2010-07-27T04:00:00.000-07:00

Like drops of rain,
dripping down the paves
at the dead-end of night.

I hear the slowly fading voice
of all that used to be.

My dreams betray me so does my tenacity.
As I give away you into me.
Powerless I lie,
reminiscing all those moments.

The drops of memory thrown at me
like the dead leaves of a once alive tree.

The thoughts mutilated incomplete,
time plays with them and the order perverts.
Changing into what was not.

It’s a thought merely a dream
and I shall live again,
grow, be awake perhaps free .
So this I shall partake.

Just an old man’s dream, it is
and I am just a character
a Shakespearean Hamlet.

It is but Claudius’s dream
I shall be alive
later I shall breath.