Biswajit Chattopadhyay

My secret desire

The paucity of words don’t hurt me anymore.
Perhaps I have spent a lot of them, recklessly in my grammar classes or for some hated friends in the defunct what’s app group or for something not worth remembering.
I would rather describe this morning in a different way, in a different language without the usual vowels and consonants.A new language of broken sounds and innocent laughter with occasional sobbing that will trigger some response from the dizzy flowers of the roadside plantation, some quick but meaningful gesture from the ageing birds from the balcony of the deserted houses of the old city I had left many light years ago.

From the day I started forgetting things, names, phone number,date and time I knew I will need a new language to live at peace in this new world with a slow dying brain.

But believe me the babbles of newborn babies are getting more meaningful… the murmur of leaves, the sound of the ancient river, horse’s whisper,the changing colour of the long summer night,a pale hazy morning looks easy to my eyes and ears.

But amongst the ruins of my battleship I will never forget that letter, the last handwritten letter you had written to me some sixty years ago.
Those childish but painful words still hurt me more than the arthritic left knee,a sore that lasts beyond time.
Your faint hint of a smile never eludes me and will float like a pale white cloud in the horizon for ever.
But the passive reluctance in your gesture reminds me of a cobweb in the window of an asylum where a robotic nurse had planted the picture of a starry night in the bedside mirror..
I was able to make a great escape from the hell but lost my name and identity for good.
But still I have saved some money to feed myself with a bread and banana,few cups of tea, occasional eggs and some old music stored in a stolen mobile phone.

Forgetting is not bad … It is a new learning tool to those without baggages… a life without medicine, without love, without dignity but with more freedom like a lone fox dancing in moonlight.
Some blurred images come and go with an approching dimness of a wooden lantern where acceptance is the rule and the ruler unrecognizable..

But a secret desire remains…to touch your pale dry lips only once with my frail index finger and to say a last goodbye to the world of rational words and disappear like a powerless vulture from a land of carcasses to it’s last journey into oblivion…

From Talky House to Beadon street

I remember those days in “Talky Show House”
When I was young and the earth was green
And we had played a game of cat and mouse.

Nobody won and my slate is clean
Of my first stint with Rosemary in…’ Blow Hot & Cold’
The crush of autumn and David Lean!

Those halls are down or already sold
Still the desire remains to go and see
Some happy memories and a few moments.. “bold”.

So we decide to keep our Friday free
In the evening in this sweltering heat
To go and watch a Bangla film

*’Star’of North was our last retreat.
The lone white pigeon of Beadon Street!

Dreams…1

The
World within
Me breaks open
For free..finding none
But fragrance of childhood
Like nectar,songs or erotica
Keep coming…of our fights
Blisters,infatuation and red light
Our long parade,red book and delayed masturbation
Till stars break down from sky…

Humbled by the geometry of light
White and painful…of eyes
without eyeballs,
And missing a galaxy of new dark particles
Within or without the
Traveling energy
Finally
Gone!

Beautiful losers

To all those beautiful losers…
May I ask you to quietly lie
On the city of lust and winners
And let the sky mourn and cry…

Let the winners take it all
Money and the headless crown
And all those privileged men
At the cost of your blood stained gown…

Your mother is there for you
In the graveyard near an ancient tree
Your nation still mourns for you
From mountains to the breathless sea.

Winners die of venom of unpaid guilt
Beautiful losers will never quit.

Yamuna

I have never made her my Yamuna
But look .. she is lying on the highway in the guise of a lame road with the pungent odor of earthen bhar of red tea and false Petrol in her body!

On their way towards temple people try to acquire some virtue from her dead skin and give her a bow.

Arunava and I had visited Addyapith last evening to see the tub and the tombstone…

I have never called her Yamuna, by any means ..
She had always been thirsty … like a raging river.

Addyapith & the offerings

There is a solution when an error is found in a question of trigonometry…
Errors do appear in the corrected list of a statistical database too.
This is the rule so worship the emperor of error with flowers, jaggery sweet cakes and wood-apple leaves.

The shameless quadruped gate keeper of Addyapith temple knows this pretty well and in return gets a share of the holy offerings from the temple.

Even in the sacred template of literature such robbery is in practice…

Only a solitary man walks all alone with a walking stick in his hand

On his road to eternity he is in possession of the ignorant key for a lock
that will never open.

A swollen gum & some analgesic memories

My gum and a submerged tooth asked me a question.

I replied: if I don’t give you an answer?

They made me feel their presence inside me

And I was forced to go back to Borges for ‘The Secret Miracle’.

My young dentist is the son of his dentist father.

His twin brother is a spiritual optometrist who doesn’t change my lens

I think I have been undone by a small stone inside the brocolli leaves

And the first wind of the morning reminds me of cooler spring.

While my gum and the hidden tooth piece conspire against me

An intelligent ‘someone’ brings out a poem from my analgesic memory..

Life in a bus stop

I stand alone

In a desolate bus stop

My road is a thick layer of snow

And my destiny is not in my hands

Still I have bought a bucket of flowers for you

A bus is coming to me from a distance

To take me to a new world of sun and light

My phone has stopped buzzing inside my pocket

May be it’s dead

But my flowers are still alive

Life is like the road or the bus stop or the solitary man waiting for a miracle

I may board the bus

I might not be able to make it

But you have time in your hands

Will you wait for me ?

The doorman and the cafe

The doorman knew the exact time
When we can’t sit together face to face
And order a glass of soda with lime
And sip with a straw in utter disgrace..

Inam couldn’t sit with Sofia alone
Sanjukta had her reasons to disagree
With Chinmoy about the Pahalgam massacre
When someone from the shadow shouted at me..

To read ‘kalma’ aloud to which I had obliged
But I read my poem in a different accent
And the shadow fired some flowers at ‘rupashi bangla’
But the vdo of the show could not be sent..

While everyone present had something to say

The doorman closed the cafe for the day…

When an ageing clown conducts a poetry festival

Kushal’s words remain unspoken in the festival’s hall
A morbid silence echoes in the air of silent rejection
Somelekha misses out with her depth of unadultareted emotion
And Inam with his precision of words looses out to his libidonous cat!

The judge’s court remain blind to the beauty of the sullen art
Their selection is a mystery..of agreeable choices
The poet overlooked expresses a sigh of relief
The director of festival declares:we are the best!

An innocent invited poet enters the hall braving the summer heat
The clown of the show stands up to read his poem in hushed silence..

My Wednesday evening

My Wednesday evening at Shyambazar,Dreamland clinic
Where the fluorescent lights are hanging from the overhead roof
A few guests have come with some poetry and healing balm
Their faces reflect the story of unconditional help and hope.

The air is thick with anticipation and the odour of antiseptic lotion
A young couple holds hands, their eyes locked in a bout of unadulterated love
An elderly woman flips through the pages of an old magazine
Perhaps she knows the head of the clinic from days unheard.

Arunima wanted to die but is still alive
She knows her mitotic renal cells can gift her another five years
Now she councells those men and women who are at bay
And she pays the coffee bill of a doctor and his handsome mates..

My Wednesday evening is filled with laughter and tear
Friends and enemies are free to join without fear..