but I’ve stopped
guarding it jealously.
I’m tired of walking alone.
I’m putting my soul
on the market.
Could you help me
contact Mephistopheles?
Terror (after Rustom’s)
I reassess
the jar
of gajar mewa nu achar.
If I swaddle it in underwear
and secrete it in my cabin bag
will I be found out
by the hunched man at security?
Clearly, he’d be suspicious
of its chilli-sting
and the cloying sharpness of vinegar
enveloping each shaving.
I bury it till it’s gone.
I weigh my chances
and look unpreoccupied.
Faltu
Why should it be
a pejorative?
Why, if I were to say
these words are faltu, should it
be self-deprecation?
I like the sound—so much more
personal and nearer
than ‘inconsequential’, ‘waste of time’,
or ‘feckless’.
Like a pet name
or a relative
or a small town you once visited
and remember intermittently.
Adil
He hovers over Cuffe Parade
from the eighteenth-floor balcony:
guardian, priest, and friend.
His visitors are outsiders.
His tiny wife’s a ‘foreigner’.
Once in three years I ring his bell.
When he opens the door, I lose myself
in the Sudhir Patwardhan painting.
He asks politely if I want the fan
and goes off to make Nescafé.
The ceiling is crumbling;
the floor’s covered in newspapers.
What could be higher than here?
Is it any wonder when the sky falls down?
We’re so far away I hear little
of the city in which I was a child.
On calm days, I see him glance
at the balcony with empathy
for sparrows that recur.
I feel a part of him
—as, in his kurta, he returns
to ask me questions—is aware
of their itinerary, and of the poems
flying in from different neighbourhoods:
they are his real guests.
Occasionally, he’ll lower his mug
and sniff the air—I’ve never seen him smoke—
and furrow his eyebrows and smile:
‘I think the city is burning.’
Seeing (in) the Dark
Under the eyelid
is dark,
crouching like an insect.
Above it, making no sound,
dark rests.
The immensity
round the eye
can be gauged
by imagining darkness.
The imagination’s awake:
it’s aware
what’s under the eyelid
inlaid with gold
is a fusion
of morning and night.
To open the eye
is as much effort
(or more)
as opening the window
to gaze from dark room
to allow oneself to be lifted by the opposite of sight
into cool nullity.
There is no unadulterated night.
In the room
the edges of dark display
hairline cracks like an old wall.
The ceiling is absent, you only
guess, head on pillow, above
you the cushion of the universe.
Keystone
Keystone’s as old as Mohenjodaro.
I summon it from a past life.
The antediluvian lamp posts
dour roads and darting by-lanes
the bare ramshackle precincts in which
hydra-headed policemen
mass together to overpower
bystander and thief—
the cops’ heads get lopped off
and immediately reassert themselves:
there is no time for death
where there is such confusion.
Never did crouching bystander
give the slip, never
was thief captured in Keystone—
in the scheme of things he
made his getaway. All’s passed
like civilizations do: disappeared
while less tangible things persist.
There’s hardly a trace of Mohenjodaro
except in books discarded or sold.
Kalbaishakhi
Inaugural uncertainty,
a shocked prelude
in which everything wavers
until the parched
prehistoric ledge
breaks out in spots: three, four,
like the leopard when it was created.
It’s raining upward, drops
bruising the stone from below.
The air upon your cheek
begins to melt like ice.
The Killer Punch
The seven-foot-three-inch
staggering grunge
punches the hero so hard
the face splashes
like it’s not bone but water.
Then the perfect features
recongeal, with two strands
of hair curiously out of place.
He hits him again.
He hits him.
The hero’s hurtling across the table
like a plate flung by a furious housewife.
He should be dead, but to our perspiring
staggering disbelief,
he rises to deliver a blow.
In life, is this possible?
Sometimes. Self-belief
and the work, if they’re any good,
are weirdly absorbent.
Nothing appears
to exhaust them. They fly,
they topple, they’re battered,
they get up, like it didn’t matter
how often that killer punch hit home.
Ma
I said it
not really to call
or invoke:
from childhood, it’s
a sigh
of wonder, an expression
of short-lived fatigue and love.
Last night I made the sound.
Shocked, I asked myself
who is listening?
Because
no one possesses
the privilege of being quite as close
and far away as she is.
Never was sign so
severed from referent,
never was word
Sandesh
You also mean
‘news’.
You’re news
that stays news
although chhana
goes off easily
crumbles, soon sours,
disintegrating,
regurgitated semi-solid.
Yet, first beheld,
you’re an announcement.
Inhaling, we’re thrown
(while it’s what we expect)
by cardamom or mango
preceding you.
Tapas
Spiritual rigour
and meditation.
In Alcalá
a series
of restive visits
punctuated by introductions, laughter, and farewells.
Then an exact repetition
in a neighbouring bar.
No one stayed long.
The hellos and goodbyes
each time had the same transient forgetfulness.
No one sat.
We only stood.
The door was never too far away.
The liquor tasted of tropical
fruit, the fritters
were oddly familiar.
These were no resting places.
The point was to move on.
In Calcutta, too, sweet shops
are meant for dispersals.
And yet, in those snatched moments
of bonhomie and trade,
is there a plausible confluence
with silence and withdrawal?
Telebhaja
The main industry
in Kolkata—
real estate
and telebhaja.
Someone keeps launching
fritters in oil.
The telebhaja drown,
rise steadily, and brown.
The smell of kerosene
and smoky besan
stirs this market’s
appetite for itself.
Buildings arise,
flats unoccupied.
Everyone’s on the pavement.
These pavements are hard to traverse.
They’re where clothes are sold.
They’re tunnel and arcade.
You pass one point in time
to another as you weave through stalls.
The pavement is kitchen.
The busy incursion
and extension of habitation is constant
until wherever one walks
is home.
A hand scoops potato peels
and fingers brush your breast. You notice
telebhaja soak up the paper.
Notes in Mid-Air
In business
everyone’s asleep
the bodies swaddled
but secretive
as cocoons as if they were growing
inside the blankets.
Illuminated faintly
by a sparse glow
they could be arranged
for a Beuys exhibition
or a catafalque
of luminaries.
As you waft spirit-like
through a curtain
—the barrier sufficient between two worlds—
in economy you find
the silhouettes seated, nodding
in the dark like figures in a park
after the sun’s gone down.
Night has come suddenly. The aisles
are like interconnected paths
in old Europe—grandfathers
follow resolutely after infants while others sleep.
A baby’s been laid flat
the way I saw
a homeless child
in Apollo Bunder
diverting herself
at midnight, outstretched
on the lamplit macadam
where her mother had placed her.
Similarly, I discover
this one before the first seat
of the first cabin
by pure accident.
The Garden Path
Making my way
from the bathroom
I realize I’m
in paradise—
not aftermath of dream,
just a flash of daylight
in which flowers in the garden path
are arranged yet not fixed
the background shot through with single bird call
as I stumble towards bed
finding my way
from memory,
not lost or adrift, feeling an extraordinary
joy, not a euphoric pleasure, but
a balanced happiness, as if
I know, groping, I’ll be here again.
Sadness-Joy
They are not different.
It’s not as if
they succeed
or imitate each other.
They aren’t twins
but indivisible.
Like sweet and salt, they are
one, not plural.
Impossible now
to distinguish
the lift from the fall
of gravity, the recurring pang
of loss from your healing embrace.
Notes to the Poems
Sandesh is a dry sweet, made in soft or hard varieties from a dairy product called chhana.
Petha is a North Indian sweet made from ash gourd.
Creek Row is a lane used as a shortcut between Upper Circular Road and College Street in Calcutta.
Chhana is the cheese-like reduction of milk curd.
Rustom’s is a Parsi restaurant in Delhi. Gajar mewa nu achar is a Parsi pickle made with carrots and raisins.
‘Adil’ is the poet Adil Jussawalla. He lives in Bombay.
Kalbaishakhi are the brief April showers that occur in Bengal before the monsoons proper.
One of the meanings of ‘tapas’ in Sanskrit has to do with meditation, asceticism and spiritual practice. Pronounced differently in another context, it refers in Spanish to appetisers.
‘Telebhaja’ literally means ‘fried in oil’ in Bengali. It’s the commonest form of street food in Calcutta.
THE BEGINNING
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
This collection published 2019
Copyright © Amit Chaudhuri 2019
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Ahlawat Gunjan
ISBN 978-0-670-09186-7
This digital edition published in 2019.
e-ISBN: 978-9-353-05455-7
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