Figment dawn dispeller of figments...

Glimmers of the Night

2012-02-14T07:34:00.000-08:00

“On All that Strand

Glimmers of night. Glimmer, then a little dimmer still. Night is when we see. Where to see is to strain the eyes. That is when they come alive. All that cannot be seen in a shower of light. The little that remains at the edge of light is precious indeed. Population has decreased finally. The places are populated by themselves if not by others still. What is closed is open to images and texts betray reality, here in this half-light. There is death in the light. A death, full of coins: a face darker than ever in the light. In the dark is the jest, as it was in the beginning. The strides of movement make scratches in this dark. There you have a purchase on the dark. It better be. The pursuit for company and a slow scuttling sound. Someone has passed by just now but as if never been. Always but as if never! That is where they come alive. Images restore silence to objects. The waves have lulled them to sleep and everything is there in its final place, as it were. That is how they are…will be forever. The subdued glance of the little boy glides past the balloons waiting for the sky. They sit upon the empty chairs only to go up slowly into thin air. The strand gains the sky. Moment by moment. Moment upon moment. Glimmer gleaming on till dimmer and dimmest still. Night is the time to read love letters or obituaries better still. There is a lump of soil between the two.

At End of Day”

Arka Chattopadhyay

Pain

2012-02-13T10:46:00.000-08:00

Everything goes

Such silence

That much too

Everything

Every such silence goes

A voice, known of old

Whispers in the past

Now addressed to others

Others only others

When that voice does not speak to you

Silence starts speaking

Pouring

Every pore goes

That much too

And that little also

That will also go

Silence in there still

It is bleeding

Riddling

2012-02-11T12:16:00.000-08:00

What is unstated in love is stated in loneliness.
What is loneliness is not stated in love
What loneliness states as love is not stated in loneliness.
Love digs into leave-taking as if death had nothing to do with it...

Inching

2012-02-07T21:17:00.000-08:00

A word

Once a name

Is now a word

Again.

She has crossed aslant the name.

Smiles upon the rain and a skirt held up

Leaning as if submitting to his shoulders

Was not submitting to power itself.

She could well observe

How age turns prayers into wails.

An aged word

Desperate

To create new associations

Moving towards the dark

Where names do not drop

Anymore

On praying hands.

Bhim Chhaya Slum: A Place Where to Be

2011-12-19T01:09:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-11T23:19:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-09T10:16:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-05T22:49:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-04T02:54:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-26T09:52:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-24T02:26:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-18T05:52:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-17T21:55:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-17T21:50:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-17T12:40:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-13T08:43:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-09T21:07:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

LONELY

Dearest,

But it will not be LONG

And that's the saving grace.

Without-6

2011-11-06T04:55:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-20T01:04:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-18T21:24:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-30T20:52:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-22T03:47:00.000-07:00

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…

2011-08-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-28T04:32:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-12T07:20:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-12T07:08:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-20T04:11:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-18T08:03:00.000-07:00

Houses old and new

Lots to differ

The only worth while

The new with a roof

Leaving room to chance

The Outside

2011-05-11T09:57:00.000-07:00

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 ]

2011-05-08T00:27:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-07T11:25:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-18T12:01:00.000-07:00

The title-story from my book of short-stories

Requisition

2011-03-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-10T12:39:00.000-08:00

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?

2011-02-14T02:03:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-13T12:21:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-06T11:26:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-06T11:22:00.001-08:00

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.

22 December

2010-12-24T11:55:00.000-08:00

He left me today

Long long ago

I did not know him

Back then

Then on

As if I know him

Now

Now on

He left me

To be

Today

His parting lips lisped

Lisping on my name

He returned to me today

Long way back

Back in the on

Alternation

2010-12-12T13:04:00.000-08:00

Never to understand

The chants of that old beggar

As if reciting from some older epic, long lost

My classes take me away from him

Away, far away from this unclean station

There I go, to my lecture platform

I Wait for the day when I can sound like him

Upright from my lecture-platform of

Enchantment.

I wait for that radical day of leakage

When the blank haunt will no more

Give the shivers.

That will be my best lecture

The rest handpicked by the worst

In the melting crust inside his nose...

BIrthday

2010-11-24T10:57:00.000-08:00

Poor old birthday

You rugged tramp

Embrace me with

Your raining hands

I will fold my pain in half

And insert it into your navel

I will hold your pain

Like my yellow binocular

It's already dusk, sweetheart

The hours of late lonely light

Do you still blame me?

Roll

2010-11-23T11:33:00.000-08:00

Three cows on one matador

Head straightened on

Three tails

Two inside

In the sheath

The middle one

Lolling out

Anxiety's tongue

And wandering eyes

Middling bad

One matador with three cows

Bloodstains in the milk

Two inside

And

The third

Lolling out

Blue Birth

2010-11-23T06:20:00.000-08:00

I told them

To leave

Those who had not returned...

I told them

To come

Those who had not departed...

Alone with the candles

On my birthday

Alone once again

Back alone

As once

Back again after five years

The colours poised on the windscreen

'Sex and philosophy'

That tune still haunts me

I ask you to depart

Again and again

Long after your re-departure...

I saw one candle less

Did you take it away?

Anti-Gone

2010-11-21T09:25:00.000-08:00

Light...Late...Bad

Too little...too late

Be...late

Nibble...Never...Nape

For ever and ever

Glow...Glass...Gleam

Gone...alone...gone

Too late light too little

To nibble never any nape

Belated

Ever and ever only gone

Glassy glow gleaming alone

A...gone

White-Noise

2010-11-21T09:18:00.000-08:00

Fingers in dust

Dust-turn

Fingers in milk

Nails scribble

In milk

Noisy dips

Dusty milk

Milky noise

Invisible scribble

Holy magic in potholes.

Rapid-Fire

2010-11-19T12:59:00.000-08:00

When all go away

All

Life begins

When all come back

All

Life re-begins

When some go away

Some

Life begins

When some come back

Some

Life re-begins

When no one goes away

None

Life ends

When no one comes back

None

Life ends

When I go away

When you come back

You

The place re-begins

When some go away

And others come back

The place re-ends

Re-winds...

Telos

2010-11-19T03:20:00.000-08:00

Going away

A way

Going away

I lag behind

One cannot

Even murmur

In this dark

The ear

Getting bigger

On birthday

The ear

Rapt on

The unplumbed

Hole

Away

A way

A birthmark on time.

In-Ter-Course

2010-11-19T03:06:00.000-08:00

Terminals

Mature in the dark

Sex is anatomy

Locating the cracks on the surface

Limiting

Demarcating

Inscribing

The gyrations in the dark

The cracks widen...

Keep widening

Allowing time to enter

Heaving nipples and navels

Blurring the image

Sex, a way of helping the butcher...

Schizzz

2010-11-18T09:21:00.000-08:00

I will tell you one day

One day to tell

There will be

I will be

One day

There

To tell

I will be

Will

To tell

There

One day

One I will tell you

One day...

To day

Pour

2010-11-18T09:10:00.000-08:00

Bodies joining

In the dark

For mere multiplication

The old man stares

An image

Hard to the core

Softening afterwards

Softening still

Unless the old man

Jumps to his feet

His gaze frozen into a grip

Masterminding

Their departure

Thus the bodies un-joined

Each suck throwing up a corpse

Nipples connote genocide

And the poor old thing

Hardening on...still

Positions

2010-11-17T10:19:00.000-08:00

Were a kiss to pierce the dark?

Mine

Dark

Kiss

Yours

Vice

Versa

A promise better still.

Is it too different

In the dark?

Can it be love in the dark?

Ours

Vice

Only

Mine.

Yet

2010-11-17T10:18:00.001-08:00

There it comes

On sloppy feet.

I pat on her head

As she goes away.

The white tunnel

Grumbles.

All love

A heap of slangs.

All life

Two half-sayings.

Saying to each other

What if they met?

scribble

2010-10-30T03:32:00.000-07:00

The house of love

Burns

Proves

The house of love

Pours

I

2010-09-17T03:12:00.000-07:00

There is a raw sincerity when I wish death...death only...but a plop like never before and it departs...the inability to die and the impossibility to live...do they have to be so much in love around me in the dark? I am the bench where they meet, kiss, fondle and make love...I look on...sometimes with tears...at other times, untorn...almost lidlessly...

Win-Dow

2010-09-17T02:51:00.000-07:00

The pain of dots

Accuse on

The pain in dots

Self-accuse

All that rots

Time to go

For Good

There is

No time kept...

Pierce

2010-07-15T10:47:00.000-07:00

If I were to tell you

Of the failed moisture

And the love impossible

On top of your greatcoat

Of the day he counted the stairs

While climbing towards the rooftop

To jump

I would stop doing all that

If I were to tell you all that

The not-all that cloven in your eyelid

And sand in his buttonholes...

Roped

2010-07-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

Hunger
Under
Belly.
Pindrop
Street.
Midway
Nonsense.
Refuge
Goodwill.
Buyer
Helpless.
The midnight-blood
Oozes out unfed.

That Dark Back-Road

2010-07-03T11:35:00.000-07:00

That dark back-road
The two of us
Impossible to go
Hand in hand
You gave me the room
And stood aside
I could not
See your face
The dearest face back
In the dark
Darkest
I passed by
Who knows?
Otherwise
We could have been there
Together
To gather
All the carrions left.

CFP: Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature

2010-05-19T13:56:00.000-07:00

NEMLA 42nd Annual Convention: New Brunswick, New Jersey April 7-10, 2011

Call for Papers
Seminar: Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature

Contact email: arkaless@gmail.com

Conference Date: April 7-10, 2011

Conference Venue: Hyatt New Brunswick, New
Brunswick, New Jersey

Deadline for Abstract Submission: Sept. 30, 2010
(300-500 words)

Notification of acceptance of papers by 5th of October, 2010.

Deadline for Final Paper Submission: March 15, 2011

Length of Full Papers: 4000-5000 words (The full papers are to be mutually exchanged and read well before the seminar and shortened 10 minute presentations, consisting of four double-spaced pages, are to be made in the session)

Seminar Description
The seminar seeks to explore the complex and paradoxical relationship between the discourses of philosophy and literature focusing on the works of Samuel Beckett. Beckett has had a long standing dialogue with philosophy. From comments like ‘I am not a philosopher’ and ‘I do not understand philosophy’ to his love of Democritus, Arnold Geulincx and Arthur Schopenhauer, from a rich texture of philosophical allusions in early works like Murphy to a more resistant non-allusive (or allusive in a very subterranean way) later prose like Worstward Ho, Beckett’s work has always been seen in relation to the philosophy, from championing a certain kind of Cartesianism to reviving the latent philosophical discourses of the Atomists, from positing existentialism to parodying it and so on.

In the 20th century, Beckett’s oeuvre has attracted a handsome amount of philosophical attention with almost all major philosophers responding to his work in vastly different ways. From early readings of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot to the responses of the poststructuralists like Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, reactions from Adorno, Stanley Cavell, Julia Kristeva, Irigaray, Martha Nussbaum and in more recent times perhaps in the most extensive fashion in the writings of Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley and a host of others, Beckett has commanded a rigorous attention of the philosophers. They have sometimes cited Beckett by way of exemplifying their own philosophical conceptualization and problematization while on other occasions they have seen his
work as a genuine philosophical repository, generating issues and debates, intrinsic to the discipline of philosophy.

Eminent Beckett Scholars like Ruby Cohn, Stanley Gontarski, Anthony Uhlmann, Garin Dowd and others have been sensitive to what we can call a ‘philosophical turn’ in the field known as Beckett Studies. Apart from dealing with the philosopher’s influence on Beckett from a biographical point of view and Beckett’s influence on 20th century philosophy, the seminar also encourages papers that see Beckett’s work as a topos where different and often contesting ways of conceiving the philosophy-literature interface meet each other. Beckett’s interest in classical philosophy and the supposed representational relation between philosophy and literature is on the one hand while on the other is the poststructuralist and postmodernist appropriation of his canon which tends to locate his body of work at the margin of philosophical thought. Samuel Beckett thus remains the fascinating literary icon that he is with Derrida defining an auto-deconstructive margin of philosophy in literature with Beckett and Badiou drawing on Beckett as an original philosophical thinker, who is instrumental in his discourse of a return to philosophy.

Therefore, the thrust-areas are (the abstracts may include these perspectives but need not be limited to these at all):

v Philosophy as influence on Beckett.
v Philosophy as intertextual cultural memory or a textual principle in Beckett.
v Beckett as an influence on 20th century Philosophy.
v Beckett’s texts as philosophy.
v Beckett’s texts as an anti-philosophical discourse.
v Beckett and the cognitive philosophical tradition.
v The politics of philosophical appropriation in and of Beckett texts.
v The philosophical categorization of Beckett as a Modernist polemic of canonization.
v The philosophical status of Beckett and its contribution in a supposed undermining of the pragmatics of his theatrical practice as a playwright and stage-artist.

All enquiries and abstracts are to be directly sent to:

Arka Chattopadhyay
M.Phil Scholar
Department of English
Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Address:
Krishna, Flat-105
75, J.K. Street
Uttarpara, Hooghly
Pin-712258
Ph: 033-2663-8270
91-9231536815
Mail: arkaless@gmail.com

For Suman...

2010-03-17T12:34:00.000-07:00

We were wondering if it was the right place to have a seat. Things looked a touch too far, a touch too high. And then the famous old strings...the curtain went up...and there he was...bang in the centre of the stage...bowing down and yet not really bowed. The guitars were to the left of him, the synthesizer to the right. He had just completed his sixty years. What about them? How old were they? To time...to space...yet another gift. He sat. The light and shade started their play around that posture. He was like a mark...a little speck of light in the dark...he had become a pure image. It took sixty long years for him and eighteen for me...there he was...still that half-lit face with a stubble looking at me from the cassette-cover of his first album--"Tomake Chai". I was seven then. It was 1992. My father had brought it home. The eighteen years of adulthood had already marked the encounter, his sixty marking senior citizenship for him. That much of distance was always there...always needed...for company...for fable...for the sound of silence. He was an old man now, baldness all around him. Gone were the cassette-days... stirrings still in the head.

He had kept his promise to me, making me think, dragging me to the road, albeit a road not taken, to haunt me forever. The spectre of the political, as intrinsic as the vestiges of thought that could never go from the dim mind--all sought in vain and yet never unsought...there he was--as always clasping and unclasping the fingers...trying to hold on to something, as if never there. What could the songs do? Could they change the world? Could they feed the have-nots? The questions were all simple...much like their answers...holding on to the wind a touch more before blowing away. The old grit in the bone was still to induce the time, as if ever been...for the "ever"...for the "been"...to erupt... to explode...songs with the ringing core of truth--our very own "ganola", caretaking the voices as well as the silences in truth in what he would call a guardianless and intolerable time. There was a heap of words inside the heart and thus the courage to climb the word-mountains from the beloved time. The pins were fixed.

He named them...the loved ones...of music...of life...so many names...so many, a little too many, lost in the clockwork. He insisted the lights to be on. He wanted to see...to look..."to see to look"..."to hear to listen"... to feel the bond...preserve it.

"Bhange jeno janlar garad shobar"

----my way of loving what would be termed the 'political'...

"Tomar chokhe alokborsho korbe jokhon gan rachana

Tokhon tomar ratri chhunte amar emon kangalpona"

----my way of loving what I now derivatively call the 'two of love'...of rupture...of company...

He always made me understand their affinities. Love was more political than ever in the barricade of kisses...weaving on.

Rotation

2010-03-14T11:34:00.000-07:00

It takes a turn.

Stop.

Still takes a turn.

Stoop.

There is no other turn.

Droop.

The flesh is pale.

Drop.

Postmodernism: “It was as if no one had heard”

2010-03-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

“The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself…”—Lyotard [The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)]

What this epigraph does, apart from setting the tone for what Lyotard will go on to call the ‘paradox of the future anterior’ in the postmodern, is to posit the post-modern as an offshoot of the modern; what was marginal in the modern becomes central in the post-modern as liminality becomes its prevalent register. Is the post-modern then a carnivalised form of the modern where the hierarchies have simply been upturned? As many thinkers, as many post-moderns; as many literary authors, as many post-moderns: that is how it is. Whether it is the removal of the hyphen that separates ‘post’ and ‘modern’ (what has been called the castration of the postmodern) or the perilous addition of the theoretical suffix ‘ism’ to make it ‘postmodernism’, everything associated with the term has been shrouded in profound vagueness and uncertainty. Philosophers like Baudrillard and Habermas have strongly reacted to them, being straightjacketed by postmodernism. Authors like John Barth have expressed their wonder, if not disgruntlement at the label. Postmodernism’s obsessive insistence on all forms of closures on the one hand (end of history, end of philosophy, end of the author, end of criticism, end of performance etc), and a post-structuralist notion of endless proliferation of meaning through the perpetually differing and deferring signifier-gang on the other, has placed it in a no-man’s land. But the fascinating thing about postmodernism is its ability to turn all its critiques into its properties. You call it a no-man’s land and it will say that that is the precise point. As Frederic Jameson says, the postmodern is marked by a schizophrenic displacement of the spatio-temporal; add to it the Lyotardian ‘future anterior’ and you have the timeless, spaceless and, of course, authorless no-man’s land! You call it confusion, it will call itself a ‘simulacrum’; you call it contradictory and Derrida will say “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique”; you call it ideologically non-committal and it will retort by saying that parodies have become blank pastiches now; you call it all messed up and it will then resort to ‘micro-narratives’; you say it is playing into the hands of globalization and it will respond that it is a historical inevitable—some ‘cultural logic’ of some late capitalism; you use the word ‘Enlightenment’, it will be angrily silent and if you ask why this silence, it will say that it has been able to invert the hierarchy of speech and silence! Postmodernism has indeed mastered the art of theorizing its other, if not anything else!

It was Jean-François Lyotard who used the word ‘postmodern’ for the first time in his commissioned work The Postmodern Condition in late1970s. His insight into the comodification of knowledge where it ‘ceases to be an end’ in itself and becomes part of an acquisitional process which radically exteriorizes the knowledge from the knower, brings out the changing matrix of knowledge in the post-industrial society. Lyotard presents the new face of knowledge in terms of specific ‘language games’ which are effected by ruptures within what he calls ‘metanarratives’ or grand narratives. In a strongly anti-essentialist manner, he explores the historical destabilization of these narratives e.g. the Enlightenment project of socio-political progress and the Hegelian rationalism in terms of the revelation of scientific knowledge and comes to identify this ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ as the definitive postmodern stance. Gianni Vattimo in his book, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture (1988), critiques the Lyotardian argument for being located into a historical discourse, which it so desperately tries to decimate.

Jean Baudrillard is another philosopher whose work has been seen as a shaping influence on postmodernist thought. His famous paradigmatic shift from the subject to the ‘object-system’ is a post-Derridean deconstruction of subjectivity. Derrida in his trend-setting essay, “Structure, Sign And Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), exploded the structurality of structure by denouncing the immobility of the centre, characterizing it as an ‘interdicted’ zone, located both inside and outside the structure and thus operative through a continual metonymic surge. Baudrillard, in his radical foregrounding of what he terms ‘the silence of pure objectality’ in Cool Memories, extends the post-structuralist break, constituted by Derrida, to an extreme—“the main interest has always been on the conditions in which the subject discovers the object, but those in which the object discovers the subject have not been explored at all…what if it were the object which discovered us in all this?” (Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime) The Baudrillian theory of ‘simulation’ sets forth one of the fundamental modes in which postmodern literature has been characterized and that is an anti-realist approach. Postmodernism has questioned representation of reality on the grounds of the always already represented character of the real as well as the insufficiency of language as a semiotic register in reflecting the real. One of the basic methods of countering representation in postmodernism has been a tendency to refer back to language. The Lacanian Symbolic is constitutive of reality only through an exclusion of the Real, which remains somewhat resistant to complete symbolification. As William Burroughs says, ‘language is a virus from outer space’ and the only way to deal with it is to tell stories which would not move outward and depend upon the external reality but circulate back to itself and be self-contained. Linguistic meaning apropos of Derrida is only a ‘differance’ and what texts like Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch (1959) and Beckett’s Worstward Ho (1983) do is to backtrack into language ad infinitum, becoming immune to reality in an absolutely auto-referential way. This self-reflexivity of narratives builds up what Linda Hutcheon calls ‘historiographical metafiction’ in postmodern literature. Much like Umberto Eco who sees the ‘hyper-real’ in the entertainment parks of America, Baudrillard too, presents to us a complete destruction of the real through its optimization beyond the limit. He theorizes four ‘successive phases of the image’; first in which ‘it is the reflection of a basic reality’; second where ‘it masks and perverts a basic reality’; the third is the order where ‘it masks the absence of a basic reality’ and the fourth and the most chaotic order of the simulacra is where ‘it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum’ (Baudrillard, Simulations). The world of the simulacra is, therefore, a world of pure appearances where language, in a Derridean contestation of metaphysics, proclaims instead of hiding the void underneath. A perfect example of this will be the closing lines of Beckett’s novel Molloy (1951)—“Then I went back into the house & wrote, it is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.” It is only language that moves one level higher than that of the narrative to deconstruct its realistic referentiality, here.

Another significant break between modernism and postmodernism lies in the different ways in which they see the high-culture-low-culture split in the society. While modernists like Joyce, Kafka, Proust in different ways endorse the charlatanism, embedded in this split, postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and especially someone like Haruki Murakami celebrate what they consider to be a democratic, non-elitist and equalitarian conglomeration of high art forms with ‘kitsch’ or popular low-art genres. Murakami’s works [e.g. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle (1997)] make a largely subversive use of the thriller format. Other important post-war fiction- writers like Jorge Luis Borges or Alain Robbe Grillet also delve into what Michael Holquist calls in his essay, “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Postwar Fiction” (1971), ‘the metaphysical whodunit’ where these authors, in their own different ways, subvert the retrospective logic of the detective story with all sorts of bizarre figurations. They choose the genre for its insistent dependence on logic and then slaughter the logic through reversal of set patterns. In Grillet’s Novel, The Voyeur (1955), it is the very event of the crime, which gradually evaporates rather than a disclosure of the mysterious agency behind it. Grillet’s novels show yet another postmodern symptom by focusing more on the objectness of the objects than whatever they might signify. Not only Robbe Grillet, the entire ‘New Novel’ movement in France provides us with a critique of the psychological realism of the Modernist novel as the spotlight shifts from depth to surface in their works. This rejection of depth psychology and a fascination with surfaces relate to the deconstructive and self-reflexive tendencies within postmodernism. Postmodernism moves away from the kind of high cultural shock, a novel like Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939) creates in the common reader, and tries to concentrate on a concreteness that is real and yet a little too real for realism. Someone like Beckett might look equipped with all the venom of postmodernism in terms of its post-structuralist and post-realist orientations, but the extreme formal experimentalism, a tendency towards pervasive abstraction and a sweeping metaphysics of the ontological (all speaking of high art) alienate him from the mainstream of postmodernism, relocating him into a predominantly modernist framework. The case of Beckett is not just an instance but a valid indicator of the mutually enmeshed character of modernism and postmodernism. John Barth rightly points out in his essay, “The Literature of Replenishment” (1980), that the ideal postmodern author will ‘somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism’ by combining the ‘pre-modern’ with the ‘modern’. His instances of the postmodern novel include Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973).

Now, I would like to examine one of Borges’s stories, Circular Ruins [from The Garden of Forking Paths (1944)], somewhat closely to draw some conclusions (if there are any) about the subject. This particular story of Borges, in many different ways, deals with and responds to the dialectics and paradoxes of postmodernism, I have been discussing. The story is about a mysterious sorcerer who is all set to construct a human being through his dreams in the circular ruins of a mystical temple. It is about the tribulations of this dream-creation and its imposition upon reality and, once the sorcerer’s project is completed, the produced son is sent to another circular ruin according to a divine dream-instruction to get his making perfected. Towards the end of the story, a man comes to the sorcerer and tells him the story of a magical man unaffected by fire in the other ruin downstream. In the final moment, there is a fire in the forest, which destroys the circular ruins in a historical u-turn much like the earlier holocaust, which had turned the temple into a ruin. In the blaze of that devastating fire, the sorcerer finds himself unaffected. The fire soothingly embraces him and he is made to realize ironically that for all this time, when he had been dreaming and creating a human being, he himself was being dreamt and created by another dreaming and creating human being.
I think this Borges-story, written at a time when much of postmodernist theory was still to appear, anticipates some of its directions. To begin with, the story uses the fairy-tale (a popular art form) model to delve deep into a world of simulations, identity politics, lacking closure. The Borgesian ‘magic real’ is a technique of undoing the real through the hyper-real. Unlike Beckett, Borges does not abandon the realistic frame and tries to unmake it from within. The line with which the tale opens is almost a peerless representational fabric (“no one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe as it sank into the sacred mud…”) and it is only the adjective ‘unanimous’ placed before ‘night’ that makes an abstraction of the night, de-spatializing and de-realizing the image in the process. The entire story poses a challenge to realistic representation as the world of dreams is given an autonomous parallel existence, from which figures can smoothly enter reality, depending upon an intent of transference.

The last chapter of Baudrillard’s book, The Perfect Crime, is called ‘The Revenge of the Mirror People’ where he imagines a future revolt of the mirror images demanding a real existence alongside human beings. In the ‘future anterior’, representation is seen to fail fully in producing the ‘other’ and there shall have been two equally sovereign peoples. Baudrillard theorizes this phenomenon by using another Borges-story, The Book of Imaginary Beings (1974), where the mirror world comes alive and moves out of the mirror to challenge the human authority. In Circular Ruins too, it is the dream world that seems to have completely eaten up the real, by the time we reach the end of the story. And once again it is a radical break from the discourse of humanism that seems to ground the ‘circular ruins’ of representation. In the first phase, the sorcerer uses the pedagogic field of the classroom in his dreams and seeks to find from his ageless students someone who can be imposed upon reality. He does find one after some frustration but shortly thereafter there is a rupture in his project in the form of insomnia and dreamlessness. This rupture can be seen in terms of a postmodern conception of the epistemic and pedagogic lack in all human discourses. The technique that he then uses is a fragmentary technique of imagining parts of the body bit by bit and this blasts the illusion of the unity of the body, something that the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ is yet to impress on him. The process also underpins cloning, another technological facet of the postmodern. But initially the imagined youth remains asleep (dreaming?) like his dreaming creator. This sleep within sleep initiates the topography of the Borgesian labyrinth where once one reaches the centre, the centre reveals itself as yet another labyrinth. The constructedness and unreality of the constructor opens up the post-structuralist domain where telos suffers from a fallacy of infinite regress. It is this realization of the sorcerer that he is implicated by an-other dream of an-other dreamer, which destabilizes his existential power centre, and the perpetually shifty nature of power is disclosed. It is this subversiveness that deconstructs the genre as the centre of the mythical content is dislodged. The whole story pastiches the Frankensteinian motif and a host of other literary motifs alike. Towards the end, Borges provides us with a parenthesis where he comments upon the passage of time—“which some tellers of the story choose to compute in ten years, others in decades”. Not only is this a postmodern metafictional bent but a critique of linear and objective time as well. But the parenthesis also adds to the mythical ambience.

Whether it is the dream dimension, which is in line with surrealism or Borges’s intensely allusive texture (an epigraph from ‘Through the Looking-Glass, VI’, references to the cosmogonies of the Gnostics etc) or even the ways in which he simultaneously operates in a mythifying and de-mythifying register, I think Circular Ruins presents to us an accurate spectacle of the mutuality of contraction and expansion in between modernism and postmodernism. While Borges keeps stressing the infinite deferral of ‘metanarrative’ and gives some form of independence to all the micro-narratives, which are initiated by the story, this disconnective nuance is located completely within the Joycean structure of epiphany, which renders it paradoxical. The revelation of the sorcerer’s identity at the end of the story is not projected as a postmodernist fetish- meaning with surfaces only, but rather as a deep structure in terms of linguistic and epistemological imports. It is the text, which is trapped in this eternal tug of war as it tries to hold on to ‘the still point of the turning world’ but ‘things fall apart’ and ‘the centre cannot hold’. And it is only then that literature dreams a dream of evading both circularity and ruins. The contestational labels of modernism and postmodernism may wait for an eternity.

Works Consulted: -

a) Barth John, The Literature of Exhaustion and The Literature of Replenishment, Lord John Press, 1982.

b) Baudrillard Jean, The Perfect Crime, Verso Publishers, 1996.

c) Baudrillard Jean, Simulations and Simulacra From Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, Poster Mark (ed). Stanford University Press. 1998.

d) Baudrillard Jean, Cool Memories, Verso Publishers, 1990.

e) Beckett Samuel, The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume II: Novels, Grove press. 2006.

f) Borges Jorge Luis, Collected Fictions, Penguin Books, 1998.

g) Connor Steven (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, Cambridge University press, 2004.

h) Derrida Jaques, Writing and Difference, Routledge. 2001.

i) Lucy Niall, Postmodern Literary Theory, Blackwell Publishers, 1997.

j) Lyotard Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1984.

Somewhere This

2010-02-24T11:40:00.000-08:00

Here I stand
When all
All
Alone.

Only here I stand
For all
All
All
Alone.

There they go
Alone
Alone
All.

Allone comes

I lean on his lips.

Need

2010-01-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

Do you need me in my silence?
Do I need you in the words?
Words seek love in this shelter
When all the lips are found...

Ping Pong Gondho: A Book of Short Stories

2009-12-26T00:06:00.000-08:00

Ashtray: Special Cinema Issue 2009

2009-12-26T00:02:00.001-08:00

Ashtray Second Issue-2008

2009-12-25T23:54:00.000-08:00

When I am Gone

2009-11-28T21:23:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-24T09:24:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-19T06:23:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-21T12:20:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-10-16T06:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-26T07:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-11T13:51:00.000-07:00

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

An Image of Poetry as Waste in Time

2009-06-16T02:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-01T10:27:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-29T23:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-29T23:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-29T22:59:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-04-29T22:58:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-04T13:50:00.000-07:00

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…

ALL THAT SCARE

2008-11-21T05:12:00.001-08:00

( I )

Finally the sun came out and the room got its share of light. The night-lamp was still on. The sky had been overcast during the night but now it was fine. A few white clouds floated around in the unrelenting blue. The bad weather had disappeared. Aneek Chatterjee opened his eyes. It was eight. The alarm had not rung but the sunlight had done its job. It had pushed open his eyelids working through the inner dark. He looked at the night-lamp, pale and powerless in a patch of bright sunlight, as if begging to be switched off. He went to the switchboard and switched it off. The light inside died immediately. Aneek looked at it again, relieved?

Last night he had not been able to sleep properly. There were awkward sounds disturbing his sleep, sometimes inside, sometimes outside the room and sometimes as if in the middle of the two. Who knows? May be, he had been dreaming all of them! Whatever they were, they made his sleep rather broken, discontinuous. Quite a few times, he could hear a coin dropping somewhere in the room. There were whispers too, punctuated with other sounds, almost of a pornographic character. However, there was nothing to be seen anywhere. At least, Aneek didn’t manage to see anything.

--“Hello, is it Aneek Chatterjee at the far end?”
--“Yes. Who am I speaking to?”
--“Nobody.”
--“What?”
--“Yes. The‘what’. That is more important than the ‘who’.”
--“Is it so? Then, may I know what your ‘what’ is?”
--“Have you ever been to a fish-market?”
--“Fish market! Why?”
--“Not ‘why’. Say ‘which’?”
--“Which?”
--“Say, the Gariahat fish-market.”
--“No, not for a long time.”
--“Then go. Right now.”
-- “Why?”
--“Not ‘why’, ‘where’. That is the ‘where’ for my ‘what’.”
--“And what is the ‘what’ in that ‘where’?”
--“That is for you to find out. I can only say one thing—if you ignore it and do not go, it might just take lives. It is a deadly old thing.”
--“Enough is enough. Who are you?”
--“I told you, it does not matter. One last word—do not ignore what I have just said. Remember your position, your high office. You have a lot of responsibility towards the people. If a number of them die today, it might well be a result of your carelessness.”
--“What the…”
The telephone line was disconnected from the other end. What was left of the mysterious voice was just a tortuous and enraging engaged tone. Aneek looked at the receiver, angry and confused or both equally perhaps.

( II )

A peeling sound of thunder and Aneek’s sleep broke off. He looked at the clock. Four thirty in the morning. There was very little light outside. It was raining quite heavily. He sat up on his single bed and looked through the window. The sound of the rain was whisper-like secretive to Aneek. It told so many stories to the earth and all that was inaccessible to him. The little pores on the surface of the soil had swallowed all those words, all those impassioned stories. Aneek will never be able to grasp them. Sooner or later they will evaporate through those very pores promising yet another return. However, the rain made him feel good. He could clearly differentiate this morning from the one just before. He looked at the night-lamp in its last phase of power. Even if there was no sun there will soon be some light at least. The eastern horizon was brightening already. What a day it was, yesterday! He was still to understand its implications. He looked at the table, on the right. There lay the telephone, silent for the time being. It was the telephone call, which had started that bizarre game.

Aneek got up from the bed and moved towards the centre-table to open the second drawer on the left. There was a packet there. He had brought it home. He opened it and four packets of Moods condom came out, condoms with some dots for some extended pleasure. He pulled the chair and sat upon it, observing the packets carefully. The pictures on them were the same—a boy kissing the shoulders of a girl from the back while the girl is opening the left strap of her white bra. The background of the picture was a combination of the fire and the dark. Who could have done this? Not many had any knowledge beyond that of his single status. Aneek put three of them on the table and opened the fourth one. The contents came out—sticky and hollow. He held them in his hand, feeling through them one by one with his fingers. They were smooth and Aneek felt a curious comfort, running his fingers across them. He had never needed them. He had been left out. There was anguish in his eyes. It could still be seen despite the semi-dark interior of his room.

( III )

What should I do? It must have been a joke or may be, there is some conspiracy to do me in. What is the time? It is eight-thirty. Even if I do not take the car, it will take me just about ten minutes to reach the market. It might well be a blank gunshot, but I must verify things to assure myself. What if the voice turns out to be true? What if it is a bomb? Kolkata is still no Delhi or Bangalore, but still…. If I ignore it and then it explodes, killing innocent people, I will never be able to forgive myself. Last week, there were serial bomb blasts in Delhi. May be, now it is Kolkata’s turn! After all, I am not a common man. I am a state-secretary, a high-profile boss of the ever-assuring administration. I do have a public responsibility. Moreover, if it is a really powerful bomb, even my life is at risk. How far is Golpark from Gariahat Market? I better go and check it out.
All these thoughts ran through my mind as I put down the receiver. I picked up my mobile and made a call to the bomb squad at the police headquarters and told them to reach the place as soon as possible. I put on my black corduroy trousers and an off-white Peter England shirt to make myself sartorially presentable for the public moment and rushed to the door. The lift was right there on my floor. Someone had come upstairs just now. I got into it and pressed zero. It started moving down after an initial hustle.

A large number of market-hungry people, a lot of din and bustle, the typical pungent smell—the fish market was quite a busy, disgusting spectacle. It had been a long time since I visited one. As expected, a fish-market was hardly in my scheme of things. As I went into it, some looked up at my face with surprise. Most of the locals knew me. They must have been taken aback to find me at the fish-market. I wondered how designations had turned some of the places into an oddity for me. But, where could I find that ‘what’? It seemed almost impossible. The bomb squad would be coming within fifteen-twenty minutes. Should I look for it on my own without telling anyone or should I tell everyone to evacuate the place and conduct the search or should I do nothing and wait for the squad to come along with the police? All these thoughts kept rushing here and there from one side of my head to the other. Confusion also led to anger in me. It was directed at the situation as well the forces that were behind it. I knew I had to do something. Things could well run out of time. I called two or three known faces and told them everything. They, in turn, told some others. We went towards the centre of the market and started addressing the crowd. What we said sent ripples of panic across the people as they started running in different directions. I told them to calm down. The squad would be round the corner and there was nothing to worry. Within a few minutes, the entire market place was almost empty barring some utterly perplexed fish-sellers. They were extremely angry. Not only had they become customerless all of a sudden, a lot of their fishes were trampled also by the people running around. Some of them cried out, “What did u tell them? Why did they run like that? Look, what have they done!” As they started accusing me with all the rage of the world, I had to tell them the gravity of the whole situation. They took some time to understand but then some of them joined us in our search for any suspicious object. The squad was yet to arrive.

After about five minute’s search, we could locate a bundle at the northern corner of the market. It was kept just beside the dustbin, which we had upturned in course of our search. None of the fish-sellers claimed it to be his. So, there it was, perhaps—the ‘what’ in the ‘where’! It was a medium sized bundle, rather untidy. May be, it was made to look ordinary. The cloth had been tied up with some rope and did not have any tear. I looked at the thing fixedly. I desperately wanted to open the veil myself. The game had started with me and therefore I was the best person to take it to its finale. What could be there inside that bundle? One part of my mind kept providing possibilities while the other kept refuting them. The more I looked at it, the more I got the feeling that there was a pair of eyes inside the bundle and they were looking back at me with a blinding gaze, as it were. The gaze almost made me spellbound. My feet got stuck into an anxious immobility, curbing my angry and curious intent to uncover the object of mystery. For that one moment it was as if there was nothing in the world barring that little whore and me. All the rest had gone out of existence and all my nervous energy had found its pivot in that bundle. I was lost in these thoughts when the bomb squad arrived. They took positions and examined the object with a bomb-detector from a distance. The result was negative. It was confirmed now that it did not contain a bomb. The most probable was the first to be eliminated. Then, what could it have? The fact that there was no bomb inside could have relieved me, but it did not. All sorts of thoughts started to crowd in and almost suffocate me. Could it be something personal? Something disgraceful? Was some long-hidden truth of my life just about to be blown in the wind? I became very edgy. A great spell of helpless anger reddened my cheeks. The officers of the bomb squad formed a ring around the object and started to move towards it. The disclosure was now absolutely on the cards. I closed my eyes in anxiety.
( IV )

Aneek opened his eyes. It was almost five thirty. The rain had become light outside, the room, brighter. He looked at the night lamp. Its plight had begun. Aneek outstretched his hands and switched it off. It was a really dirty game. Who could have done it—some political enemy or some personal foe? He could still remember all those ringing laughters from the fish-sellers when the bundle had been unpacked. It was a moment of real humiliation for Aneek. The contents of the bundle had told a secret story, his story. The people might have laughed at the ludicrousness of the situation—the secretary of state along with the bomb squad in a petty fish market and that too only to find such a paltry thing! In their eyes, Aneek had been befooled. But he knew in his heart, the sadistic message contained in those packs of condom. They marked the limit for Aneek. It was a horrific reminder of his incapacity to participate in one of life’s most fundamental streams. It was a life in its own, all too forgotten, all too lost for him. He had been left out. He looked at the packets of condoms on the table. One of them had remained in his right hand. A deep-rooted anger burst out in Aneek and in that fit, he held the upper part of the condom between his upper and lower teeth. All of a sudden, the room became all white, turning Aneek into a speck in a white void. The light had come back all too quickly. The night lamp could only sigh in agony.

DEUCE

2008-11-21T05:09:00.001-08:00

The story was located deep into the night when the streets were relaxing, stretching their bodies easefully from one end of the night to another. The story was stretching itself too! There were little yawns to begin with but then it decided to tell itself…be told. The streets had just started to think that the footfalls had mostly come to an end for the day when the story decided to shake them up, a wee bit. All of a sudden, there were footfalls and quite thumping ones at that! One could see a man running across the sidewalk, nervously looking at his back from time to time. He smashed against the light post and awakened a street urchin who had been sleeping right beside it. The story looked into his bewildered eyes, full of muck. The man saw the mouth of a subway, staring at him to his left. Someone had gone into it a moment ago. He had felt a shadow while bumping into the post. How could it be open at such a time? Did it have an opening at the other end or was it yet another trap? There was a maze in his mind. But soon he realized it was not the time for thinking. The subway promised a shelter, a hideout for him. He took out his lighter, which had a small torch at its back and started running down the dark stairs. The street was still amazed. Was someone chasing the man? A very faint sound could be heard in the distance. Someone was dragging something along. The street asked the story who that man was? The story was silent for a while, lost in some deep thought, as it were, and then it uttered the word ‘Sahay’. The street could not go into the subway and check things out. So, it was the story, which went in, but only after it had made a promise to the street that it will disclose everything on its return.

The steps went down deep into that hollow until Sahay lost their count. It felt like moving down on an escalator. The stairs carried him away until he reached the pit. It was pitch dark and Sahay felt rather shadowless in its company. The torchlight helped him find a corner where he could lean against the wall and then all of a sudden, he turned around and pointed the torch at the wall, trying to find something on its surface, as it were. Nothing…it was a blank wall, much like a white sheet of paper, yet to be filled in by its writer. If it could still be white in that uncompromising dark! Sahay faced his back to the wall and switched it off. The story kept looking at him from a safe distance, imperceptible to him. Sahay kept staring into that dark where opened and closed eyes seemed all the same to one. Sahay went back in his mind. It had all started from that number. He could remember it so vividly! The train had been moving fast. It was a scorching afternoon and there were not many people in the compartment. Sahay had been standing near the gate. Something was written on the other side upon the inner-body of the train. His eyes fixed it with a stiff glance—“9836002729—Rupa, a call girl”. All places have been sold. Now who said this in present tense, all of a sudden? Had the story been following him even then? Someone must have mumbled something in his ears. Sahay took out his mobile phone from the pocket and copied the number and it was that very day on his way back home that he lost his mobile. Who could have stolen it? Perhaps the same person who had written the number on the train! However, it was only now that Sahay could say this…not then. The pungent smell of a plot had frozen the air around him that day onwards. He took a new mobile after that and it had to happen again! The same train in the same heat of a same afternoon and Sahay was up against the same spectacle—“9836002729—Rupa, a call girl”, but it was a little too familiar for comfort this time! The size of the letters had increased and now he felt them, glaring at him. However, there was something more to it and Sahay simply could not believe it! He took out his new mobile from the pocket and clarified whatever little doubt he had. He had saved his new number in his phone for he had been forgetting it frequently. He looked at the screen and then back again at the number—9836002729! He still tried to pass it off as a coincidence. May be someone had jokingly written a fictitious number which had become real in his case. Should he change the phone for that?

After a tiny respite that bitch had got back to business. Someone had thrust a handmade leaflet into his hands that day, while he had been running to catch the train. He could only look at it, after having boarded the train. It was an advertisement of a doctor of secret sexual diseases. Sahay had always been irritated by such stuff. As if he was the only one for them! But this time it had more embarrassment in store for him. The contact number written on it had been 9836002728 earlier but then somebody had overwritten on that 8 to make it 9. It was back to 9836002729—square one for Sahay. How could things be so contrived in the world of reality? Sahay could only wonder. The train had long left the platform where someone might have still been chuckling at his situation.

Sahay had to change his number. It had started to get on his nerves. But he stored that fateful thing in his new mobile alright, lest something more was to happen with it. And then it was this fearfully stagnant night when he had missed the last train that a call came from that number on his mobile. How could it be so? He had exchanged that phone and the man at the mobile-shop had assured him that he would give the phone to someone only after de-activating the old number. The loop around his neck had tightened. He had rejected the call and switched off the mobile only to realize that someone had come behind him on the empty street. Sahay started running and could hear footfalls at his back. He was being chased.

The rest, as they say, is hi(-)story…for the story…for the street. The story left Sahay and moved out of that dark tunnel. The street had been waiting for him eagerly. The story blurted out the story that was Sahay’s, but what story? How could it know the number-game? How could the story access the depths of his mind where words were fluttering like half-torn kites in a musty wind, writing and re-writing the number 9836002728 endlessly? Sahay, like most of us, had kept his most bizarre experience a top secret. The street could not understand head or tails of it and was left agape. All that was so absurd, he thought. Once again, that strange sound of someone dragging something along had become faintly audible in the distance. The eastern horizon had started to light up. The story said to the street, “I have to go now. I simply cannot tolerate daylight.” It hooted like an owl, weary of light. Ah, if one could look into its dead dark eyes where a fire was burning! It represented the eternal desire of man to tell stories, more and more stories…more and more hollow stories. The street bid him good-bye.

It was a story called ‘Deuce’ written by some obscure writer. It had been published in a literary magazine called ‘Presentation’. His friend Indraneel had given it to him. Interestingly enough the protagonist of the story was his namesake. Was that the reason why Indraneel had given the magazine to him? What else? Sahay was hardly a literary person! It was stiff due to its overtly intellectual evocations and that was what had made it so bizarre and absurd, Sahay said to himself. It was a scorching afternoon. . Sahay was near the gate and reading the story. The compartment was almost empty. The train was quite close to Howrah station. There were sounds of the brake and the train started slowing down. The same old car-shed stoppage! Sahay looked at the other side. The train had stopped. There was nothing on the other side. It was just a blank metallic surface with some scratches and patches here and there. It was pretty much like an anxious one-off page of some writer, where he could hardly manage anything more than a few pen-strokes here and there. It could only be headed for the dustbin. Sahay shifted his eyes back to the last page of the story. He could only chuckle at it. The train started to move again and he could hear a strange sound, coming from a distance. Someone was dragging something along…

2008-07-26T04:08:00.000-07:00

He made the mark on the table.
I was around.
And the sun up & over.
A red book-shelf, which could only be there!
It came into the head
Soon to push off.
The moonlight & the cats upon his toe
My lips were moving from cover to cover
Unleashing a book upto unreadability...

2008-07-19T22:58:00.000-07:00

Milk and blood like wine---what say?
Rock on-
-Chop off
Behead-
-Befriend?
Gunshots at the centre of your birthday-cake
Politicians have to talk about man
We have to urinate every morning!
THROUGH THE FLUSH STARKLY...

Bootless

2008-06-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

Those days alone in the smell!
Cry, scatter alone, a-lone!
Exclamation to exclamation!
Marching nights on whitenesses!
I have been caught out by words at deep mid-wicket!
Formation to formation
Yet still with deformity in the spinal chord
Another pig swoons in the water-cloak!
I am window-tight in a forest of pamphlets
All the funds of life
I will collect in the remainders...
Elected knee-caps in a democratic series of silences!

Denial

2008-06-15T03:20:00.000-07:00

Trifles jotted in the wires
Moon-fight within the glasses.
Once a perfecting rainbow
Another bullet is lampooned.
Twice the openers make noise
None but rain-pipes to darken.

Gilotin

2008-06-13T01:41:00.000-07:00

Hands dipped in hot, boiling milk. Utpala. Even an un-man like me! When the second bullet had struck, I knew, this was to be the end. Still inched forward with the body on wet soil, holding all the pressure onto the elbows, crippling on as ever. In this bullet-hit hell of a body, for the first time, in the (w)hole of 32 years, I felt some sort of an instinct, boiling up to a considerable height. If home can be reached, I will put in one final effort, even if it is the last gasp. Neither eroticism nor exactly self-love, it was like a desperation to create a future to resistance, that had been clawing my blood-smeared hell-body! A man like me would do something to deserve a bullet sometime! Could Utpala ever imagine this in her wildest day-dreams?

Perplexed hands then, Utpala's, dipped in hot, boiling milk. Hands almost fully white, further whitening, Utpala's. Day in and day out, this dipping, this dripping! Some inexplicable comfort, as if, Utpala's! Each time, when she lifts her milked, whitened and further whitening hands from the bowl, a child gets designed (ah! only to be a figment!)amid her finger-lines. After that, a strange anger, Utpala's, which can kill and does kill as she strangulates the mis-imagined child, dipping it into the hot, boiling milk. Utpala can create as well as uncreate.

Had to stop in this bush. The body, nearing stagnation, could hardly move on. But, still enough understanding left to realize that I had had an erection. The thing had stiffened so much, that it was becoming exceedingly difficult to crawl forward. Could not even stay on my back. There were bullets in the shoulder and underneath. Tried to dig a hole with both hands. The soil was soft due to rain and went in comfortably. Then I opened my zip and entered the thing straight into the hole, I had dug. It went deep, out of visibility. The pain started to soften. My eyes were closing in ease.

Hands dipped in hot, boiling milk. Utpala. Almost the dead of night. Subimal arrives pretty late these days. Must be some secret meeting again! With a pain that had started to soften, Utpala lifted her hands from the milk. There was something in her hands. Utpala observed. A bullet. Bloodless. Utpala looked at the blank wall, which was in front of her. Then, she threw the bowl full of milk, towards it. Little columns of milk started to make their way down in the form of streams. The wall had become partially wet with milk. There was some heat too and perhaps the surface of the wall shook a little as there were little twig-like rings of smoke, making their room from it. By that time, Utpala had closed her eyes and got stuck into the bullet with her sharp, boiling teeth. Even the bullet had to be silenced, silence.

Angularity

2008-06-13T01:17:00.000-07:00

The thread was being moved through the surface of the grass. Perhaps, somebody had been flying a kite somewhere. As our feet came into its tangle and we got stuck, we looked down, only to see the thread being pulled away from us, across the vast stretch of the maidan. I was trying to kiss her, but the thread had got in the way of it. The kiss. The lips. The family. Like upturned shoe-soles in the sea-beaches. Cross-currents, there were in the quicksand. The thread had become a pointer. Trying to take us along--an anchor? There were little pockets in the grass. Little errors. The thread was strangling them one by one, striving to establish a pause in the two of us. We looked up. Not a single kite in the sky.
There had been one such thread, sometime back. Taking life. A pigeon's left wing had come under its power, impairing the ability that may have led to flight. Then, the dog's turn arrived. I could not do anything for the bird. The thread was the similarity between the two events, the lack of a kiss over there, the difference.
Now, I could see the thread, up in the air, going round and round like a web and linking the remaining tree-tops all across the maidan. It had started to emit a tremendous energy of darkness, blanketing the blueness of the afternoon-sky with a dusk-like madness, as if the whole sky was about to turn into a giant wingless kite. She had been mute all along. Not even a sound had come out of her. Could she peep into my thinking? I looked at her. She was looking up towards the sky. She finally broke her silence, of my thoughts and of her words---"Can we get married now?"

VIGIL

2008-06-12T04:41:00.000-07:00

A watch-tower. No sounds elsewhere. No such, sounds outside. Pin drops to darkness or silence--untellable.

A mangrove forest, in the making as yet. Channels of water shivering through its body, inching towards the sea, that is (can only be) distant & dark in this blankness. Not much sound elsewhere.

Here arrives a couple of eyes, with the intent of seeing, sorry, watching. Is it not obvious? The watch-tower is for watching, pricking on!

No such man to be watched anywhere. Neither women. Only putrid sounds bubbling in what he (not us) would like to call his head! He calls out. His eyes. His mouth. Sounding out. Sea-waves--the only responses!

Then the tree-heads start nodding in obedience. Each tree vomits out a soldier under its shadow...Now a whole grove of soldiers, in the offing. Getting set, wounding the silence, which can also be darkness, by the way. Now the secret channels resemble trenches.

Now the WAR--the event, the spectacle, breaking the solemnity, that could have been allowed to be silence before.
A couple of eyes wink now--once. Then again. One by one. Together again. The battle-field now looks completed. It is time for the eyes to burn out, be finished. All this, as a resistance to the walls. Every man has become a watch-tower. Soldiers start vanishing, first one by one, then all together. Foredoomed.

Drowning

2008-06-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

A trick to find a lost key:
Coming back into the room
With a mind within the loss
Not looking for the key
Just dropping the present key
& then getting out within--
Time
Told
Retold
Finding the lost key
Coming back into the room
Once upon a room
Dropping the present one--
& all against the sea
One-two & three
It's the trick to spell a K-E-Y...

Basics

2008-06-06T13:57:00.000-07:00

I see water
-A face
Then I 'face' water
I see....
I write
'This is a window-pane
& this the premise from which
my story would start!
It would have to start from here'.
& as I finish the lines
A stone breaks the window-pane
I see water
Face
Trace
Stop.

Once

2008-06-06T13:48:00.000-07:00

The deaths carried by sounds,
Are the deaths that we evade.
The depths trodden by life,
Are the depths that we create.
Just let me be your soul,
That lulls the dust to sleep.
And
Then
Awake
Afresh,
When all the sounds are dead,
You have no hole to dig
You have no skin to scratch
Just scratch upon your sin
A still-image of life!

Before

2008-06-06T13:42:00.000-07:00

Before
A wonderful sunshine
Before
The world is unmade
Before
A green grass on corpus
Before
The sea-gull is listed
After
I want to leave for
That's the time it comes in
That's the time you get off
That's the time he speaks off
With belting rain in seashore
Before
The world is unmade
With belting rain in seashore
Here I come for that time
Before & after withdrawn!

Woundstruck

2008-06-06T13:36:00.000-07:00

Loving a night, she moves out.
One own night, hers only alone.
One minute detail still, as if long left,
As when she will cusp the frame,
If at all, that can ever ring inside the ridden names.

The myth in a chocolate-box floats along
Like her cloaked vains, water-tight.
No like, not ever like, never like the likeness
Of what the world knows like.
Her myth, hers own, a rapid myth of jungle-nights,
Mumbled strains of a loving waste,
As & when the keyhole bends
To taste the bricks of the cornfield-dust.

She is still.
----
Only still.
---
Now the time.
-----
The lacking time.
------
Up in arms.
----
Mine to shame.
------
There she picks.
------
Her closing clue.

Ring

2008-06-06T13:25:00.000-07:00

Bunch in keys
Foreseen glances
Once, twice and thrice
Upon the times
The keyholes breathing silences

I have always been in love with grammar-books.