Phisophical discourse through poetry
Oindri Sengupta’s ‘after the fall of a cloud’
A short discourse of reading

What is poetry? Apart from the so called definition, if we go deep into our thoughts, we may find, we have nothing to say about it. Why does a poet write at all? Does he write a set of imageries? Does he write rhetoric of images as stated by Mr Rolland Barthes? Does he or she write the stream of his/her consciousness? Or poetry is a culmination of a poet’s philosophical thoughts into a specific moment? Who knows? But we can say poetry is a journey of thoughts. What are those thoughts about? Death? Nature? Time? Love? If everything is connected and still there is nothing left, or if everything is connected and still there is everything disconnected, you can not explain your existence, but you are in trouble, you are in pain, you have to know the pain, the suffering, you are both in pain and in joy, then, perhaps, it becomes poetry, as a hologram of your psychologically critical moments of life.
Oindri Sengupta’s ‘after the fall of a cloud’ reminds me of such a psychological journey, a restless discourse, which, makes her life as a poet like the leaves of a tree, which are restless at the soul, but not shaken from the roots. She has her own language of speaking that discourse of mind which is tossing between doubt and faith, observing the natural course like a tree, looking at fever fret and weariness like a bird, and living like a human being. We can say, yes, here is the poet, silent in words, but restless in thoughts.
“ Picture of fake reality
Stare at my empty faces
And creep in my flesh” ( Februaries)
Not only in this poem, but in all the poems of this book, a modern way of looking at the imageries one can read as a poet. She is looking at things and not believing the apparent reality, she is going towards the psychological and philosophical picture she is making within her mind. This is very tough. Sitting within a set of actual reality and making a reality of the mind are two different things. But this is the task of a poet to connect these two in a seamless way. Oindri’s poems reflect this discourse in such a graceful manner that sometimes, as a reader, I feel making a journey with her into the hologram of thoughts. As notified, the hologram of thoughts make all the thoughts in a poem, but all other holograms reflect different aspects of the whole. The book is an integral part of that whole, where poems of this book reflect the parts of the whole.
Poems like ‘Insignificant wanderings’, ‘Time we live’, ‘The Nameless’, ‘The two roads’, ‘One who has lost his soul’ are really mesmerizing. It seems like this poet is like the person in Begman’s ‘Seventh Seal’ who is playing chess with death. And there is a discourse in their conversation. We can also feel like Nachiketa and Yama, the conversation which appeals us throughout the generations.
Oindri’s poems remind us those philosophical quest, yet it does not create an ambience of reading a philosophical discourse which sometimes shows us a barren land of dead paddy field. But Oindri knows how to handle philosophical quest with the beauty of poetry. Here, in her poems, the beauty of silence has made an ambience of poetic depth, where, a reader along with the poet, may stay a little longer and fetch their own way to go elsewhere.
She is a poet, undoubtedly, who can write “ Through the looking glass/ your painless sorrow looks like a swan”. In the last poem of this book, we may find a distorted yet a relevant reality of her own, where she writes, “If there was a space beyond all the doors,/ and the unknown roads,/ then all that is said and done would fall back/to the space from where it all began” (Place Beyond)
Keeping the border, yet, breaking the barrier of reality is a journey. She has crossed the bar. However, she has to go through an undefined path of poetry. It might be darkened or enlightened. The road has no such end.
Perhaps to go through the road, she has to renounce herself again. A poet and a saint has no such home to stay. Sometimes, silence is the key to break the language through which she is speaking.
Howakal’s production is internationally standard. Bitan Chakraborty’s cover design has depicted the persona of the book and the poet.

Hindol Bhattacharjee