Bhim Chhaya Slum: A Place Where to Be

Photograph by Twisha Deb

A place where to be. Is there a place where to be? Scraps of food for to be…needed for to be…is there at all a “for to be”?

A television to see…What about eyes? Cooking utensils for company and the parting hands waving in thin air…thin air is all that remains for to be. An oblong god upon the ground where the little girl unveils the theatre of ruins. The girl becomes a woman as soon as the television is switched on. There are ripples around her belly…a blank stare to engulf the shambles…eyes in shambles…for to be…

Then the little boy…oh the little juggler with his stick, standing as old as time and his dear old grandfather, dead of starvation. The stick stands in a ration-less world…for to be…the bathrooms and bedrooms are all alike here…so much so as if almost none at all…

A mobile still rings in all this…there is still a reaching out to a voice outside this maze of shirts and scraps. Is there anybody there? She asks holding the hand of her little daughter…walking amid the dirt…there is a buzz on the phone…Beyond is the other…

Skeptic stares…fingers in mouth and a labuoring posture that softly resembles a salute…an insistent scalp where postures and gestures unite…a place for to be…

A trampled toy elephant held in ageing hands…eyeless in the scraps…the little toy penis is still upright…Does he still have an erection in this toy land? Erect for to be…

A bandaged smile on her face, the adolescent girl and an innocent bucket hanging for company. Shirts make faces and the camera is all eyes…Can it hear too?

A half-broken mirror with its half shadow still shelters the girl…cools her off. She stands off centre, covered by the old dressing table which now has a head…her mother’s…wrinkled eyes atop the dress-rehearsal. Is there a police cordon where the final is scheduled?

There…another triplet among the polyphonic shirts, sacks and bowls. There they stand as if all standing will explode one day…at the centre of a dead calm like capped dogs moving through funeral processions.

Here the soil is hard…full of stony reserve and cracks…eyes with more than just slits…for to see…the soil breathes on the head of the little boy, caring for himself, twirling his fingers through his dense hair…or in despair who knows? There are two zeroes in a strip at the back of his shirt…at degree zero for to be…

The boy-become-man tightens the rope…holds on to the cover…a fence? The wall overlooking shame? That’s the ladies toilet or the boundary perhaps. May be, that is where their home ends in endlessness.

A place where to be is not to be…still to be…being there…the vigil is on. A place for leaving where there is no leaving. They are leaving but they do not leave…They are there…for their there to be…

[Story of Bhim Chhaya slum that had been illegally demolished on 16th

of November, 2011, though it was included in the list of the slums

that could not be demolished, as per the meeting between the CM and

Medha Patekar. These people intend not to vacate their place in their

protest against this illegal displacement. Now even their ration has been stopped.]

Overwriting

Do you need a place
To replace me, sweetheart?
Places are re-places too...

You repeat the moments
With someone else

The moments
Where
We were
Once
Alone together

Love is all about cloning
It seems...

The perpetual twelfth man

The places where I could see
The two of us
Walking, talking or standing
In spectral images
Are now reshaping themselves

I see myself as an overwritten other in your memories...

Pentagon

1.

Limits narrowing still
Shouts and disownment
Love and family

2.

The blame game
Shouts necessitate lie
Silence of the hearse
Truth

3.

A new frame
Done alone
All with love
All alone done
The new frame
Another one?

4.

The boy and the microphone
Volumes up and down
Incomprehension in a conference-hall

5.

The lazy chairs lying empty
The rope-tricks of suicide
An old light with a bowed head
Scenes at the wings of the stage.

Without-12

The tips

The edges

The play

Tips on the edge of play

Bad lines

Written worse

Hands caressing the words

The year of encounter

With the dead

With life

Love

Still at a distance from light

How long?

What for?

Her hands still ring in his

He had felt odd that day

Human walls

Affronting him

Overcrowded

Till it was over with the crowds
Over with her

Over with his

"Keys given"

That's where it all started

In the leafy murmurs

It's now time

To fold it back

The passage at the end

Moving from A to THE

Finnegans Wake

Of love and all that spectral...

Translation of Without 11 by Nabendu Bikash Roy

ও বলেছিল : শব্দের জমাট বাঁধার প্রবণতা

তাকে টপকে যাবার কথা

শব্দের পাহাড়

সাহস

এবং

কিছু স্থবিরতা

সেও শব বয়ে নিয়ে যায়

যেন চার বছর আগেকার একটা লেখা

শবটিও হয়তো

কোনো শেষের গল্প শোনাচ্ছে তাকে

ও বলেছিল : ও শব পুড়িয়ে ফেলেছে

জন্মদিনের প্রাঞ্জল উপহার

চশমা পরে কাঁদা যায় না

চোখের জল শুধু এঁকে যায়

বেঁকে যায়

আমিও তো তেমন চ্যাপলিন নই

তবু দেখি , তোকে ছাড়াই বৃষ্টি পড়ে চলেছে ইদানিং

আর আমিও

অন্ধকার

চশমার

গভীরে

Without-11

She says: Words are frozen

What about crossing them?

Word-mountains

Courage

Frozen?

He carries the corpse

As he had written

Four years back

Who knows!

The corpse may tell him

A last story!

She says: She has burnt the corpse

A lilting birthday gift

It is difficult to cry with specs

They only add curves to the tear-tracks

I am no chaplin

Still does it rain without you!

I put on my dark sun-glasses.

Without-10

The first love-bite

With love

So lovingly hidden

Under the black locket

Is the body as oblivious as the mind?

The shared

Re-experienced

This time

Unshared

You gain your self

I lose mine

This time it will be a single candle

Right behind the wipers

Slogging it out

Light drizzle blurring the image

Of the streetlights

This is the birth of solitude

I gain mine as you lose yours...

Without 9 translated into Bengali by Nabendu Bikash Roy

প্রতিবার যতবার দরজা বন্ধ করেছো তুমি

কে যেন ঢুকে পড়েছে

এই ভাবে।

প্রতিটি দরজাই আসলে হা খোলা

সব কিছু ভুলে যাবার প্রতিটি স্মরণ

ও শরীর

শরীরের স্মৃতি আর শরীরেও লেগে আছে স্মৃ!

প্রতিবার যতবার দরজা খুলেছ তুমি

কেউ নেই

কেউ নেই কোথাও

কেবলই দরজার আই-হোল দিয়ে

অতীত দ্যাখার একটা দৃষ্টিপথ

আর দরজাটাও একদিন ক্রমে ক্রমে বুজে যাবে

...ক্রমে বা ক্রমান্বয়ে।

Without 6 translated into Bengali by Nabendu Bikash Roy

এভাবে দৃশ্য মরে যায় ।

যেন স্ট্যান ব্রাখেজের ছবির মধ্যে

একটি জ্বলন্ত নেগেটিভ , তার উদাসীন তাকানোয়

এভাবে তাকিয়ে থাকা মরে যায় ।

ফেলে আসা সিঁড়ি

মই বেয়ে

ফিল্টারের ভেতরে পুড়তে পুড়তে দেখি

এভাবে দহন মরে যায় ।

মরনাপন্নের মুখ ফুটে উঠছে চারিদিকে

অথবা কবেকার মৃতেরা

কথা হারিয়ে কতদিন

কত কম

বেশি

এভাবে কথা মরে যায় ।

Without 8 translated into Bengali by Nabendu Bikash Roy

তাকে ছাড়া বয়স বাড়ে না । একটা সবুজানো আলোয়

তোকে দ্যাখার

দেখবার

সকল অসুখ ঢুকে গ্যাছে কানের ভেতর

সকল কানে

ফিসফিস করে কবিতা বলে অসুখ

যেন একটি শেষ কবিতার জন্ম

এরপর

শুধু

অ

জ

ন্ম

অজাত

যেন তাকে ছাড়া বুড়ো হওয়া যাবে না ।

Without-9

Each time you close a door

Someone enters

Thus

All doors are potentially open

The mind forgetting it all

All in a jiffy

And the body!

What about the body?

Memories of it

In it

Each time you open a door

There is no one

No body in sight

Only a peephole down the past

The door closes on memories

Potentially...

Without 8

There is no ageing without her

The green light is all I see of you

Will see...

All unhappiness settling inside the ears

All ears

Unhappiness is whispering

A last poem

Last to be delivered

All else from now

Only to be undelivered

There is no growing old without her.

Without 7: Unpoetic Personal Releases

A new black dress

Unknown

You, even more so

The bench wants to go away

But you won't let it...

Funeral of love

With Tagore for company

No way of reaching out

All doors shut...

You have moved on from me

Life, move over

Over, I can't...

You, under cover

Let me take a bow

One last time

Time last

Lasts...

You won't meet eye to eye

As if eyes necessitate love

Eyes bear hate

All hate all over...

My ears are not funny

Will never be

My eyebrows, not so neat anymore

No more pats on the head

Or little twirls among the hair

Accept

Except

Do not expect...

Why this vain hope?

GO HOPE GO

DO NOT HOP AROUND

YOU BETTER BE GONE

I BETTER BE GONE...

What hurts more, dearest?

Banishment--declared

Or

Disownment--executed?

What hurts more?...

Sorrow with you at its end

No, only sorrow

No you at its end!...

You are only at wit's end

Mine

You be happy! that's it

Fine...

She giggles with a digital camera

Showing landscapes

What about mine?

Does she see them?

No, certainly not...

The same word RID

She has got RID of me

I am still RIDDEN!

The word roots are different

All too different...

You are being clinical

I am, as always, messy

Throwing a coffee cup into the ashcan

You go away, unseeing

I see on, at your back

It is all about a missed encounter

Is it?...

I am not a man of nothing

I am least

Of least

But you are even unmaking

The least

The thus-far and the so-called

Unbreakable...

I brought your bag

Our bag-couples

You did not

Perhaps yours is torn

Forever

Apart

Unstrung

You have brought a new one

You are all too new

I am the old one, all the same!

But then the same bags given on the occasion

Forming a new couple?

Possibility?

Too little too late

Is it?

Is it ever late?

Ever little?

Forever?...

Green on your nails

I, all too green

"Green" and "dying"

As Dylan Thomas said

Invert LIVE

And you have EVIL!...

Could not see your eyes!

Seeing eyes

Eyes seeing me

Never to be again

Only mine, looking at the back of your eyes

Looking always at something else...

It is going to be

VERY

VERY

LONELY

Dearest,

But it will not be LONG

And that's the saving grace.

Without-6

This is the death of sights.

As if inside a Stan Brakhage film

A burning film negative

Staring beyond

This is the death of stares

Stairs of the past

Walking on ladders

Burning through the filter

I at long last see

This is the death of burning

Everywhere throws up

A dying image

Or dead better still

As many years

Undone in words

As many

Or lesser still

This is the death of words

Without-5

Found an old picture of yours today...

Powerless spectacles

And sun in your red school-dress

Those days you did not know me

Life given too much allowance

In its passage through me

Living through

Too little

The picture is hardly all that old now

There is no one to give me pens today

And I have no letters to write

As hesitations ease

Time welcomes similarity

These days

When she does not know him anymore.

Without-4

Let us pack identical bags and take the back road

Bags gifted for the sake of sameness

Furrowed by difference in time

Let us pack the same bags differently

The back road breathes cross-legged

Let us uncross the legs

All the same...

Without-3

Over

All over

Over and out

The word rang in my ears

She elongated the 'O'

Or was it a zero?

So hard to believe...

She tells me she has moved on

I, over.

The return is not within her power

And she feels no need.

She has none.

There is no 'O' in the word 'pursuit'.

So many years...hours...moments...all ill-spent?

All?

There is no 'O' in the word 'all'.

I believed my God who said

All that is done alone

Can be undone

When you are not alone.

But perhaps she thinks

Otherwise.

There is an 'O' in the word 'otherwise'.

A tripping gap between the words 'all' and 'over'

That's where I am.

She has nurtured the corpse in Eliot's garden.

Without-2

Love's returns

In time for ever

Now the return of the birthday gift

Unopened

The TO furrowed by a FROM

From gift to gift

Returns of love

To and fro in time

Love and all that loveless

Love less

All in circles in this feeble light

Whose birthday?

Whose letters I receive?

What a gift from whom?

To whom in time?

GIFT too is a four-letter-word...

Without-1

When the road hits a cul-de-sac

At the fag-end

It's never bitterness

It's love

Always only

Lonely

Misunderstood

Not understood

Perhaps never to be

Re-understood

Always only

At the fag-end

Of Affinities and Distances…

Surfaces and depths burn. The body keeps itself in the middle. Somewhat known, somewhat loved, the rest revolve in a maze. Things fall into place here. The place too falls into place. Here there is no affinity. Here it is all about affinity. The body keeps itself simple in between these two contradictory sentences. It constitutes space and gets constituted by space. Can the body replace the space or become the space in some unknown way? There is always a tinge of distance in affinity.

In this world of white sensations, letters are composed with body fluids. There is a haze around the entire landscape. Dazzling light suddenly tethers the dark sprouts and the camera becomes an eye captured in its own gaze. The forbidden zones twinkle with interspersed implosions of the unfamiliar, the unknown and the unknowable. The body becomes a fetus on the surface of inscription. It is only the distance between two people that allows us to measure affinity. Can we at all measure affinity?

Teacups hide a smile or two and an evocative blankness surrounds the blankets in unequal folds. There is exhaustion in this endeared body-prattle. The camera sits pretty, sometimes hangs, and deftly disturbs the nipple. What about knowing the body? Can there be affinity there, in the body? The menstruating television hardly answers. The head is haught and mobiles ring silently where the moisture gathers on the looking glass. The torso is cut with glass—the smoke rings of affinity. Boots gape in the afterglow as cameras look forward to a journey among the faded leaves.

The body is under surveillance. The black cat blindly rotates in the vicinity. Bodies are taken over by slumber. It weaves its own shapes on them. The red flutters get stemmed by the status of the bare feet in the affinity. Does affinity have the power to control or is it only a spider at rest at a distance? The shrinking eyes have the answer but they will never let it out. Affinity is the secret in the boy’s indifference to the clawing eyes of the crow. Seen through the spider’s web, the darkness opens a pocket of light. There is a promise of shelter there: a space for affinity.

The leaves have become pages. There is a reading here. We are moving among wild books, a room for the dead, unread, and those alive continue to read each other. From the cleavage to the nipple, it is only the space of a bookmark! Affinity is the unreadable locket in this house of riddles. A fine rain begins to fall in the maze. There are no streetlights here. No umbrella. No going anywhere. Affinity has distanced you into motionlessness. But the shapes keep moving, curling, cusping and stretching on the mysterious axis of graffiti. Fairy tales are immune to dog barking. There is affinity for you. How to fill in? How to evacuate? Do we fill in? Can we evacuate? These are the little bombs in affinity. Perhaps, the greatest affinity is in the vanishing act. Let us coax the magician.

[For my dear friends Ronny and Twisha and their photographic journey]

On Happenings and Interruptions

In the twenty five years that I have walked the earth, I had not seen two things, among many others: the Indian cricket team lifting the World Cup and a government without CPI(M) in West Bengal. Now that both the events have happened, one can safely say perhaps that history is back in movement. I am fortunate. Many people have to die without seeing Halley’s Comet.

In Parliamentary democracy, truth can only have two faces: the dominant ideology and its antithesis. Politics is reduced to a dyad. The totalitarian party-line of CPI (M) has been dialectically counterpointed by a seemingly self-dissolving party structure. The victory of TMC is being hailed as the victory of democratic mass movement beyond any hardened party-line. Thus the out-of-place candidatures, the beyond-party incorporation of civil society faces, eager to cash in and above all a non-theoretical prescription of alliterative simplicity: Ma [Mother], Mati [Soil] and Manush [the people]. There are three terms here. But is it really a politics of the three? The third term insists from its ex-centricity.

This is a modification indeed but is it real change? Can there be any real change from within the regime of Parliamentary Democracy, which as a structure, is perhaps the newest face of the Capital. What is interesting here is not only the way the Left political rhetoric has been hijacked by Mamta Banerjee and her party but also the way it has been radicalized in this apparent localization of democracy at a distance from the Parliamentary system of party-politics. This is a projected politics of the outside-of-politics, an effort, as it were, to reconfigure politics according to the demands of the market in this so-called post-political age.

A just subtraction has taken place. The corresponding affirmation works here as a pure promise in a mythological future. Do we wait for Godot then, knowing very well that he will never arrive? To wait for waiting’s sake only demands a lot of courage. Godot may not come, but others will. When the real outside takes on the pseudo-outside, the overlap of the two holes will produce another rupture.

It is always good to continue with ruptures.

So, let us continue to break.

There will be a point where the breaks will end. They will have to end at that pure point. How many mangled bodies still await us before that point? The body politic will have to be a real body for that to happen.

“Sparagmos” is that rotten body of truth.

Let us act in wait. As someone said, one may die a septuagenarian and still not see Halley’s Comet. Politics still seems to eclipse the not-all with the all.

My Nose

My nose is red now

Full of scratches

I have put on two specs

Here in this mortuary

I overdo the Joker

Death in coins

The conductor flicks his tickets

There is wind down there

My nose is red now

Black heads removed

The light from Victoria flashes

One last time

I remove my specs

Too little to see in this dark

The cave with tentacles

Needing paper to breathe

My nose is red now...

My old fingers

My old fingers

Where someone lived

Years back.

A large headed man with a single horn

Jumping ahead with vaults and volleys

Up and down from the various joints of the body

My old fingers have forgotten him now.

But the good old skin

Still erupts with older peels

I roll them up and remove them

My dear little folds of sorrow

There he dies

In my old fingers...

A poem for Kim ki-duk's Spring,Summer, Fall,Winter...and Spring

A stone tied to

The doors with demon stars

Open on the waters

Time freezes and unfreezes

The boats coming and going

Until there is walking on the waters

A stone tied to

A calmed violence with moving letters

Curved and uncurved

A vigil on the water

For both man and his son

How many grief cycles

The stone tied to?

Fire on the water and the little child

Weeping at the edge of the cavern

Mother died there

Faceless

Stone tied too

One does not show faces in these waters

There are letters on

Letters perspiring and crumbling

And yet persisting in circles

Will anything ever come to pass here?

The body folds inside

The gaze atop the hill

At long last

Fixes the landscape in one

One day the demon doors will crumble on the boat

A stone tied to...

Brim

They had left the place alone

Love alone

Alone they had left the place

Place alone

He had placed his hand on her forehead

Fore alone

Alone hand

There were pawns in her head

Not alone

To love

To place

Chancing

Houses old and new

Lots to differ

The only worth while

The new with a roof

Leaving room to chance

The Outside

The webs settled down and opened their tentacles in the dark, drying the tears in the

process. When they evaporated, I got into my own. I was sitting in a place where two

circles of light had intersected. And yet, the torso was dark...darker still. I belonged to

both the circles, but perhaps to none. ‘One always finds one's sack in the end’,

someone had whispered into my ears long back. Did I love him or was I the only one

and all the rest, a figment, never to be the same again? Perhaps there was a sack for

me too, in a third circle of light, yet to be seen. But was I not prohibited to enter a third

circle? What was mine was this rigmarole of inside and outside. No, I was not even the

partition. The two circles had intersected clearly. I felt as if I could change forms and

become one and all...all this and all that. And all of a sudden, I felt as if I was lifted into

thin air like the half-empty syllables of some inane murmur.

He had picked up his sack from the intersection of the two circles of light. A soggy

impression of the torso still remained. Faint were the footfalls and he moved out of the

two circles, into a third, intractably dark. Could there be tears in the dark? Somebody

had said to him that tears were nothing but 'liquefied brain'. Did he ever love that

person? A spider slipped through the mouth of the sack, as if to silence it!

[A Text written for a set of photographs by Swapan Nayak ]

I saw a window last night in my dream. The same from which Deleuze had jumped to his death. Does the window remember him still?

Faceless

How people like to laugh

Point to a point and laugh

Face to face, face on face

And laugh.

I only create a face

Where all laughs can be contained

They think themselves out of laughter

I am the thought in their laughter

I laugh too in their laughter

Like Yorick's skull

I am no melancholy jester

But I will never stop ridiculing myself

PING PONG GONDHO

The title-story from my book of short-stories

Requisition

The most basic thing to ask---

Is it yours or everyone else's'?

Does it toy with you or everyone else?

The questions bounce back from

The surface of the hairy wall

Tagore's king is silent

Beyond the unruffled flow of sensations

When you ask

The most basic thing

You get the most basic answer

Silence in between the whitened bricks

Loss

She tells me,

Things are lost:

Once lost,

Lost for ever.

For good.

The night of light

And the rains

Starlit.

Lost for Good.

She tells me,

All good lost.

Torn petals

Seal my lips.

Moonlight on hers.

For ever lost,

In all that good.

Days of loss

To be lost again

In nights of good

For good be lost!

Till the window-smell

Loses itself in the fog.

Since our ways are lost,

Let us hold hands again.

Once more,

One last time,

For good and ever.

Some thoughts on life...mine...mine?

When she had gone away, he had seen her last in a mirror with tears hidden under the pupils. Years passed and he had shunned her in all possible traces until the last when she reappeared again to disappear again. He felt dangerous bubbles filling in the long abandoned water-pipe of his mind. An old kite fell into it. He had lost control over it before she had gone away. The kite revived the teardrop, long lost behind the pupils. He could see his eye through the crystal of the drop once again after a long long time.

Black Stones

Black stones. All the world's sentences. Thereafter, black stones, once again. Nudging beside the parking-zone, a scene-zone. The black stones give a little sitting-space to you. Fame's cameras wandering everywhere. One or two branches picked up here and there in a lilting movement of lips. The red ants of absolute stasis start inching inside the poor old mind. The black stones stretch their wings. A broken pot, torn graves and dust-stones over black stones. The tree buzzes. The falling leaves write gibberish on the yard surrounded by corpses of children all around. The black stones open their eyes underneath humiliation. They send dark letters of indulgence in the unwritable chasms on both sides, soon to turn into marbles of structured feeling on the wall.

I will have to return to the glitter. Thus moves the torso. I get up. The black stones hold on...cling on. Slow holds fade behind the circular curtains of the witch. Little fizzles and a bit of divine purgation.

"It's closing time..."

Two hard nipples appear on the surface of the black stones, like erect pupils of light. All my sentences get filtered, tweaked and dissolved in their gravitational pull.

Black stones.

All the sentences of the world.

Thereafter, blank white page, once again.

(Park Street Cemetery, 11.2.2011, 1-50 p.m.)

OxyMoron

No Rhododendron in Winter

Only steep paths onward

Like mother's blood-beds

A snowy red as if encrusted

The bag sits pretty

We are getting on

Walking on eye-bags

We will soon be greeted

With the hairy stool-cliff

Mother

The day when

Her disease

Became

An unflinching sunglass

Love-pipes all around her mouth

And I allowed her to be tied in restraint

Darkness fell on the observation-cube

The zigzag lines of scansion

---Keeping life---Still---

The receptionist smiled at my name.