Ping Pong Gondho: A Book of Short Stories

Ashtray: Special Cinema Issue 2009

Ashtray Second Issue-2008

When I am Gone

It will all come back
When I am gone.
Every single thing
Back in its right place.
In the final space...
I will be able to find
Everything
When I am gone.
There is still some water downstairs!

The Night Before

Let it rain on my birthday...
Let it...
I would like to die
At the end of the night
Before my birthday...
People talking still.
Let it...

Hell: Remembering The Other People

He went off...
The body went out...
The face went in...
Rain made holes in his slippers.
The body went off...
The face went out...
He, back in...
There was silence in his slippers.
The face left back...
The body left out
He, crept on...
His teeth turned into ropes.
The body left blank...
The face unkept...
He pulled out...
That's all...the grin.

Say-Thing

Pornography is the most intense form of prayer
The screams are always working around what one hears
As the name of the holy father..."Oh! My God..."

For The Other Bacon...

He turned.
Facing the back.
A sliding-point
Was created in
The curtain.
His arse--
Another curtain,
Closing on the
Virgin paper-pulp.
A very white mind,
Very little hair on the surface.
Next to little trace of growth.
A rimless exit
From the historical farts.
Unheeded, unfinished
And yet to be undone.
No Second Coming or
Second Troy for him.
Not even the Anti-Christ.
Just another man, ungiven
Failing to master the image
Like an excrement.

(Trying to verbalize the great painting by Francis Bacon)

Once Again

Those shades once again
A midnight in a long time
So many years, unfathomed
Weeds blanketing my playground
Before so many years, unbelieved
Those shades twice born at midnight
Like never before, those roots
In between, as if never passed,
A shadowy cog in the offing
Weeds unblanketing my epitaph
So many years, unknown
The shades, perhaps never to be
Once Again...

The Plot-Mark

A sleep as deep as the hollow of a crow's skull; two holes...where, were eyes once. Now gone; switched off. She becomes imaginable to me only in that deep a sleep. Is there blood still, in that dark, in those ruptures caving in, where there could still be some skin...not to be. She knows how one falls asleep, how another becomes sleep just like what I think---how to write and not to become writing at the same time. One can still sense some compensations to be scattered in that dark chamber of the skull...a few bones left still.

Is this a fantasy?
Do I only want to save myself?

Her eyes...open now.I slither away , away into the tip of a gun which has never had the privilege of knowing me! There are some birds in the sky. I look up...well, they can feel it all. They all carry a bomb each...in between their lips.

All this and other preambles like this, only to devastate the betrothed. I break it open, the birds, unflung, along what could have been the horizon...my very own. There would have to be a sleep, quite unlike the hollow of a crow's skull.

BUZZ-LIGHT

SUN ON THE BONES
AN OLD CRAMP
ACROSS THE CHASM
ANOTHER MURMUR
SUN, A FAKE ON THE BONES
AN OLD FAKE
BLOODY WHORE
A CROSS IN THE CHASM
SOMATIC MURMUR
A SEMBLANCE OF AN OOZE
PEPPERING THE DEAD CENTRE
OF WHAT USED TO BE
HER NIPPLES ONCE
...RAIN...

AMBIT

A PLOT OF LAND
LIGHT LIKE FORAYS
NIGHT
ANOTHER PLOT OF LAND
PAIN...

An Image of Poetry as Waste in Time

Play: Malyaban

Original Novel: Jibanananda Das

Dramatization: Shubhashish Gangopadhyay

Directed By: Kaushik Sen

Theatre Group: Swapnashandhani

Cast: Kaushik Sen, Reshmi Sen & others

Light: Ashok Pramanik

Sound: Swapan Banerjee

Costume: Reshmi Sen


Mr. Kaushik Sen told me in a short little post-performance dialogue that he was

attracted predominantly by an image of poetic waste in Malyaban. The dramatization

of Jibanananda Das’s novel (posthumously published in 1972) indeed foregrounds a

pitiable image of poetry wasted by the hostility of circumstantial time. It is more

or less a textually faithful production. Like Das’s novel, Malyaban, the play

directed by Kaushik Sen, revolves around the character of Malyban (Kaushik Sen), a

middle-aged clerk in a British company in colonial Bengal with the freedom-movement

in full swing. He lives with his wife Utpala (Reshmi Sen) & daughter Monu in a

shabby two-storied house. The play tells the story of this unhappily happy family &

the curious love-hate relationship between Malyaban & Utpala, who are poles apart in

every way. Malyaban’s fussy, talkative & extremely domineering wife starkly

contrasts his poetically introspective temper. Communication beyond domestic

triviality has ceased to exist between them. Sexuality is also a faint memory.

Malyaban is isolated in a claustrophobic ground-floor room while Utpala & Monu sleep

upstairs. That is his sulking nook where he revisits his rural childhood, a pure

world of nature, which has disappeared in his current Calcutta-haven. Much of the

play’s conflict lies in Malyaban’s dreams in his past & their depleted condition in

his present. His revolutionary fervour, unrealized like so many other ambitions of

his, has brought in frustration & a lack in his self-belief. He is trapped in a

no-man’s land between his liberative political dreams & his ironic placement,

serving the British colonizers to earn bread for his family. Does Malyaban’s failed

life hold the key to his sterility & his submissiveness to his wife? Is it an

inverted Jimmy Porter scenario, then? The more Jimmy failed, the angrier he became.

The more Malyban fails, the more subserviently silent he becomes. But, that silence

is poetic, as both Malyaban & Kaushik Sen will tell you.

The play does not have a great deal of action. It moves back & forth in time to

incorporate fragments of memory. The plot proceeds in concerns with death,

loneliness & erotic jealousy. A new-born child dies in the neighbourhood. So does

another neighbour’s wife. Malyban kills a little cat & dreams his as well as

Utpala’s death. He has to leave the house to stay at a mess as Utpala’s elder

brother comes to live at their place with his whole family. Men start finding entry

into Utpala’s room as Malyaban finds it hard to compete with the new-age

Calcutta & all its macho youthfulness as represented by Amaresh, Utpala’s

new friend. Utpala, on the other hand, seems to tease Malyban’s dimming

masculinity through this game of sexual jealousy. The play ends with the opening

lines of the novel to emphasize the element of monotone & stasis in an infinitely

repeatable circularity of Malyaban & Utpala’s lives. This, however, is Kaushik

Sen’s directorial interpretation. It was not there in the novel. Neither was it a

part of Shubhashish Gangopadhyay’s script. The innovation fits in, more or less,

with the spirit of the novel as well as its performance, underpinning the

repetitiveness of lived existence.

Malyaban was always going to be a difficult novel to dramatize because of its

plotlessness & a heavily loaded poetic language. But, full credit should be given to

Shubhashish Gangopadhyay. The idea of using five narrators, often as the chorus,

sometimes as marginal & referential characters & occasionally as an alternative for

stage props (they even play hooks in a scene), works out wonderfully on stage. They

perform the inner-drama of Malyaban’s mind, forming an other to his self. On stage,

these ‘bhands’ (as they are called) also open up the passage, which connects

Malyaban’s existential malady with the greater malady of his times. They are all the

more important, because in their abstract, fluid & almost spectral register on

stage, they can dramatically naturalize some of the most verbosely philosophic

passages of the novel. The script-writer’s credit is that he brings into the play,

the lilting poetry of Jibanananda’s spiral-language, which might go on to establish

a new dramatic idiom in Bangla Theatre.The performances were competent. Both

Kaushik & Reshmi did justice to their roles. But, one feels that Kaushik Sen’s

acting was a little too realistic at times. He was too identified with his character

to create a distance from Malyaban’s self on stage. Malyaban’s self-confession of

solipsism demanded that distance. And he certainly could have under-acted more.

Reshmi as Utpala was subtler in her expressions, conveying her agonizing love for

Malyaban in moments of helplessness, trying to love her husband & then not being

able to. The other side of the irritating, fastidious & unimaginative Utpala did not

go unnoticed in her performance. All that should suffice to avert a feminist upsurge

against the play. The dynamism of the five narrators, however, was the real

show-stealer. They coordinated the whole performance, appearing from & disappearing

into the light & shade of the stage like humming worms of the night. They sang;they

danced; they recited & finally they conquered.

The stage-space was handled quite brilliantly. Upstage center, on an elevated

platform was Utpala’s room. Malyaban’s was downstage right, outside the curtain,

carrying the suggestion of not only a separation from Utpala’s room but also an

alienation from the primary performance-space, as it were. Malyaban & Utpala’s

dialogue thus became a virtual dialogue between the core-stage & its extension. The

‘bhands’ cropped up from the corners, the left wing downstage & even from underneath

the platform of Utpala’s room. The offstage was also sibilant with the guests in

Malyaban’s house, the kitchen & all pivotal sounds from the neighbourhood (the cry

for the dead child, the funeral hymn etc), packed in it. All these splits in the

stage-space became a mirror of the fragmented existence in performance. Almost

throughout the play, there was alternate lighting on the two rooms, signifying a

mutual exclusiveness of the two worlds of Utpala & Malyaban. Spotlights were used to

trace the clown-like narrators. The lighting was successful in creating a

chiaroscuro on stage. There was minimal colour in lighting. The use of stage props

was minimal too. There was no lavish scenography. The sound effects were well

thought out. The chirping & the hooting of the birds, the cry of the cat--all

created an eerie nocturnal atmosphere, which was required for setting the mood of


Malyaban. The play-script was nicely punctuated with Baul songs like ‘loke bole’ &

Jibanananda’s poems like ‘Shuranjana ’. All music & recitation added on to the

drama. The play was set in a tragi-comic key by director Kaushik Sen. Utpala’s

shouts & grudges pitted against the meekness of Malyaban drew laughs from the

auditorium while their sense of living as wasting in trifles, was also underscored.

Certain performative moves & dramatic moments deserve a mention. The expository

scene, where Malyaban’s tussle with his past aspirations of becoming a lawyer is

projected in terms of a choreographed ‘Kabadi’ routine where he is defeated in a

game against the five narrators who then throw down books on the fallen Malyaban, is

poignant. The scene where Malyaban sees the sky studded with stars as the narrators

hold little lamps in an otherwise dark stage or a rare moment of sexual intimacy

between Malyaban & Utpala in darkness, or the scene where Malyaban tries to be manly

with Amaresh’s bicycle as an object of erotic envy, are all well executed. All these

moments turned the stage into a poetic image. But, at the same time, all these were

images of movement & action. One felt that Mr. Sen was worried about holding on to

inaction on stage. He concretized all reflection in terms of acts. Even the memory

of Malyaban & Utpala’s imprisonment was made tangible with two of the narrators

holding bar-frames in front of them as they spoke about that past-

episode. The trajectory of performance could have been less strident. There could

have been less of physical exertion. The play required more passivity & a greater

shade of abstraction, perhaps. But, doing that was risky. Kaushik Sen’s attempt was

extremely good but it lacked the final frontier of daring. Jibanananda Das’s

Malyaban hardly wanted to be novelistic in a given sense of the term. It was almost

autonomous of its genre. In trying to be dramatic, in another given sense, Malyaban,

the play, partially lost the element of artlessness, essential to the spirit of the

original in an otherwise faithful production.

In the tiny exchange with me after the performance, Mr. Sen did imply that he

wanted Malyaban to be a play of indirect action like Chekhov’s The Three

Sisters or The Cherry Orchard. But, the question remained--did he achieve the

Chekhovian indirectness? Yes, but only in parts, like the terminal scene where

Malyaban & Utpala froze in an intensely united posture of physicality, the lights

went off on stage & their voice-over whispered to complete the last words of the

novel ---



“-- Konodin phurube na shit, rat, amader ghum?


(Shall it never come to an end, the winter, the night, our sleep?)


--Na, na, phurube na.


(No, no, it will never come to an end.)”


The mumbles stopped. But, nothing ended. It all went back to the beginning as the

first words were re-uttered by one of the narrators. The curtain came down.

Malyaban’s room, his bed, quilt & table, all remained outside the curtain, as if

never performed. The image died in stasis. However a lingering impression of void

was everywhere.

Overture

That night.
Last that.
Middling bad
.............
Buttons in my stomach
Pen-pushing their way
.............
Towards that
Oblique pinhole.
Worse, all of that
...............
The simple harmonic motion
Redemptive, around the navel
............................
That old photogenic wound
Still un-worse, on the right
............................
You have come in
At the wrong time
Sweetheart.......
I have been changing round the candles on your birthday cake.

Derision

Letters I could not deliver, I could not write.
A dog that starts barking whenever I begin,
The ball-boy who has not received a single ball today
Pierces into the microphone.
Letters I could not write, I could not deliver.
An unexamined touch of an unknown hand in the dark,
That endeared back-road where ants take on strumpets
Falls like moonlight on my copulating words.
There could still be tears in the dark---
De-populated, Like
Letters I never wrote, never delivered.

BINOY MAJUMDAR TRANSLATION 2

As If Some Voices

Binoy Majumdar

As if, some voices are speaking, perhaps.
Watching intently all the things I do,
They are reproducing all of it ceaselessly.
After writing upto this point, I hear them saying
That I hear and see properly, I have understood by myself.

In such a way I am dealing with poetry.
All those strange young men have gone away, I feel.
It is afternoon and a cup of tea is badly needed.
Let me go and fetch it, telling Buchi about the tea
After returning from Buchi’s house, I am writing
Once again on the page of this exercise book.
This poem has become quite a physical phenomena.
As Buchi is not in her house, I have told her elder daughter
To make me some tea. Let me then go to Ranjit’s shop at least.

BINOY MAJUMDAR TRANSLATION-1

Having Done With My Poetry

Binoy Majumdar

Having done with my poetry, as soon as I write my name
Some voices, unrecognized, start buzzing—look! He is still so accurate
When it comes to his own name!
It means they are looking at me from quarters close
In times, I am writing my poetry.
Even under such circumstances
I continue writing my poetry.
How can I know what happens in case of other poets?
As per the given word, now I will go out. So on let me be gone.

TWO OLD POEMS...

THE RAIN-CLAD UNIFORM
A FEW A FEW DROPS…….
CANKERS GALORE
.. MORTALITY.
THE DROWZY CORRIDOR
CROPS ANEW ANEW…….
THE DARK CHORD
..OBLIVION.



DO NOT SIT ON THAT CHAIR
.. IT IS LANGUAGE.
DO NOT DRINK FROM THAT CUP
..IT IS REASON.
PICK UP THE RECEIVER
..‘ENGAGED’ TREASON.

The Twitch

Nilabhra had closed his eyes for a moment. A grip loosening on nonsense. And then there were the things on the floor in heaps and piles…waiting to be withdrawn, waiting for another re-cycling, one more at least. Who knows, the almost putrefied wonder book of his childhood with its yellowish damp pages might be resurrected as a picture drawing pad in the hands of his yet unborn daughter! Why daughter? Why not a son? The typical tryst with the other sex? Well, all that lay far ahead in future. If at all. There might also be nothing. He might not get married at all! Now, that would be an impotent thought! Could Nilabhra leave his mother? Could he bid adieu to that body which had been given its primal wound at his birth? Was it him? Who is he, now? No one knows! Not even Nilabhra! The only thing that he knew was a ghastly and yet attractively opened up series of wounds, which had punctuated her body since then. Debjani, his mother, had always been a Falling woman, not having anything to do with the past participle form of the verb however! As if, she alone was chosen to literalise the infinite recurrences patterning the human condition! What recurrences at that! Churches could have made a martyr out of her. But, they had slipped the knowledge that there existed someone like her, cut open to immortality by each fall and each dislocation. Bit by bit. Moment in moment.

A rusty, old-little tricycle in the middle of what used to be their bed-room, just a year back. This was the house where he learned his first vocables…syllables plucked out of thin air in course of his rides from one room to the other. Nilabhra had become too big and bulky for it, now. The three wheels were both the beginning & the end. The middle comprised of a brief failed attempt to cope with two! Nilabhra always lacked balance! A few crashes here and there & that was the end of that. He had seen fear in a handful of dust! Now, the legs! Now, the walking, which had taken him to this old house of theirs.

He had come in to close the windows kept open by his father in the morning. The house had breathed through them all day. Now, the end had come. There were heavy and roaring clouds covering the sky all over. So, Nilabhra too, had to come. His was the job of strangulation, of suffocation unto demise of breath. He had not entered this house, since having left it, almost ten months before. The formidable fetus! It had been repaired & coloured meanwhile. The old scratches of his nail, the oily impressions made by his oil-cloaked hair, the spirit of the dead Chorai which had come in one day about five years ago—all had been axed, removed from the palette itself. Nilabhra closed his eyes and the old creaking sound of the door, being locked out in darkness almost one year ago, returned to him with a vengeance. He had stayed away from this house, being apprehensive of the ejection that its half-forgotten objects will bring him. He had opened the lock after a long time. But, that pungent smell, which used to welcome him & his family after each longish trip once, was hardly there. The windows were the culprits. They gaped at Nilabhra. Trip! Oh! What a word! How obsolete now, in the immovability of the body, in which Nilabhra had initiated his very first movements. As he had feared, the house had hardly forgotten Nilabhra! Repairing had rectified its injuries. It had gained a new sharpness of sorts.

A pair of surgical gloves. Full of water. Kept under Debjani’s left toe. All for relief. This, her fifth fracture and eighth operation! Nilabhra had been filling them up afresh, each morning. He felt like a poet while doing it…making hands…water-hands of an aquatic Frankenstein. He had just washed her back before coming into this house. A scarred, singed skin which had grown rough and hard. It was much like the rain-hit streets of Kolkata…potholes darkening. In the old days, she used to frighten Nilabhra whenever he was unruly by making faces. Faces with peculiar contortions, which evoked his awe. Now, her face had become arrested in that expression permanently. As if those lines were screaming to him ‘I will not get well this time!’ It had become almost a habit for Nilabhra to start off his days with that. The body, which once used to be Nilabhra’s wonder-ridden playground, had been turned into a nightmare of beheaded familiarity. Peopled by fearful wounds, which sometimes made him wonder if his gaze had been the criminal! Was all this because of him? Like a sighting of the full moon, which made it wane!

Nilabhra, quite unawares, had flopped down on the empty corner of the floor, just behind the heap of things. Outside, it had become more overcast. It could all be seen from the one window that was still open. The mango tree with a promise of embrace, weaving into the house through it. This room had witnessed so many glimpses…lights coming in at the dawns…all too many…the tender touch of the curious mango tree, endeared in time…dismembered with time. Could he not see it again, that early morning sunlight in this room…all that glory…awakening. Now, the window only imposed a feeling of the dark. How new was the yellow distemper of the walls! They were sky blue earlier. Nilabhra recalled. Then the eyes opened. If he could change Debjani’s skin! Was India not anymore the land of magic, snake-charming? What about a new Kholosh or even a new body for that matter? The old turning new…becoming new. Closing eyes. Weather breaking in upon Nilabhra. Thunder. Lightning. The riddling drizzle becoming heavier, penetrating the back of his shirt from the side of the window--- the final space for a breath. He went further into the heap. It was a snug feeling of reclaiming the old dear objects—the childhood bathtub, the old play-mirror not without a crack, quite a few toy-cars, a broken mouth organ & so on. His head stooped. The legs folded into contraction…hands covered round his own back, almost like a self-embrace. Suddenly, there was a sound, breaking the oozing silence of his position…it was Nilabhra’s mobile phone. It was Debjani calling. Her mobile had been kept with her. Information’s sake. Bed-ridden beside her pillow…just like her. Nilabhra was sweating all over! He looked at its screen…a queer expression of recession on his face.

The bed. Two fans. One on the ceiling, the other a stand-alone. A couple of eyes in the middle, extending to form a body, nearing ruins. Fixators. Wounds. Screws inside. Debjani. This new house, which they had moved into, was her favourite. She looked at the mobile screen. Nilabhra had disconnected the line. She put the phone back in its place & picked up the book again. Nilabhra had been telling her to read some book or the other, for quite some time. But she had always said that she could not concentrate. Nilabhra had tried to read aloud some stories to her. Stories … they were like a slip-bridge opening upon life. Debjani had lifted it; Nilabhra was trying to get it down again…back into connectivity. The last couple of reading sessions, however, had started to make an impact. Debjani could feel the words enter her with little murmurs. She had finally taken the plunge today…an attempt of letting the stories reenter her afresh. It was The Collected Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. She was reading a story, which was called The fall of The House of Usher. That is what she wanted to tell Nilabhra. Perhaps that would give him a rare smile in this pervasive gloom. But, there was no response. Because he did not wish to turn again. No wish of turning back again…