First Exposure
Counting Trains
Ground Report
Timing Death
Varanasi Teaches
Ramblings in Bodh Gaya
The memories of my early childhood
Draw upon the claims of red designs
On the falling walls of the nineties' Bengal.
Declarations and assertions:
Marxism is a science. I'd notice the tip
Of the sickle, how sharp, of metal or stone,
Raw edge, tip curved up to the moon.
Rallies in the sleepy mofussil afternoons
Vote dao! Cholbe na!* Around the green football field
Wet under a humid overcast sky, grey.
A slow progress towards the apocalypse.
Memories hang thin from wires in my bedroom.
Images out of the past leap.
Among the shelves of Naxalbari, the Soviet, Latin America
These stray pictures I don’t know where to keep.
*Election slogans in Bengali
In my village at night, in October
Another train rattles past, away in the distance,
Through the sleeping fields that turn over
Heaving, alive, small houses now awake.
The screen of trees
Now awake, they turn their branches.
First piercing, shrill then flat, by this
Curve of the moving whistle
Many know the call of home.
Underneath the open country sky
Echoless joy
Leaves behind the next layer of silence.
The houses settle to stillness.
The trees go back to sleep,
Their branches droop,
The wind conjures fairies on harvested fields.
I look out knowing tomorrow
My shoulders will still be light,
I will sit outside, listening to the dragonflies
And let my skin blot the dew.
Another train approaches
Another hour gone, but now the village lies still.
The whistle now is an assurance,
The line will swing, oscillations have time-periods.
Far in the distance, first shrill then flat,
The insects go quiet and listen with their wings low
Silence and sound arrive as waves.
The cell phone tower a tall living beast
Criss cross bare skeleton in the evening
On its crown the moon rises
Out upon the August sky, silken transcendence
Balms the warm twilight steel,
Through the millions of speaking voices
Seeping out into the sky, farther
Than its glow of rimmed flakes.
Anecdotes and conspiracies abound my heart
The giant machine never tires, everyone is tapped.
Things on this planet on the same heavy roll
Broken hearts scattered across the streets
The dim kulfi stall awaits laughing children in vain
The night falls in a monochrome.
Dragonflies wheezing in the sky,
But why use metaphors any longer?
A note is a note
You must listen to it to know it.
Sometimes the simplest bass lines are the tilism
The simplest picture the answer.
Only sometimes though,
The trick of this gig is to know
When.
When you consider bailing out,
The question is when to pull the plug.
What argument can justify
A good man’s decision to die?
Either way, tomorrow will bring heaven or hell again.
Remember the good master who once said--
You will live or you will die
Both are good.
One more week passed in Varanasi
One more Sunday consumed.
The infinity loop is the goddess of choke-holds
Her gift of immortality to me is due.
July sky, the glass lid of a cooker
Within my skull it brews
Drops of Ganga, grey with human ash
Condensed fall, I look upwards and say
Fools despise the ground beneath their feet,
They stare at the abstraction and pray.
I breathe deeper into my rotting,
Tricky infinity I have seen in this town,
No perverted providence awaits,
And that is all the good there is.
Many a wise man has worried himself thin,
But I have a worldly obligation not to kill myself
So I let the city weave the circles of dreams.
The last event here was the Buddha’s enlightenment.
I have lived in Gaya, seen it as a quiet little town. Carbuncles of undead
bald prehistoric hills, neat colonies with sprawling nurseries, little shops
comforting enough, your mind can rest in quiescence. The outside world barely
matters except during elections or cricket matches. Predictable, manageable
variations, a safe picture you can carry home to dinner with your family.
Rambling around in a torpor, one evening in my neighborhood,
Here children of the salaried households learn to ride the bicycle
After school in the lanes, the iron gates are locked at night, vehicles
pulled inside, safe. Little lamps everywhere, an apartment nearby is under raid,
A ring of women offering services against boredom,
Clients slip out quickly through the walls.
News broadcast from the paan shop, no better wisdom or virtue.
Little towns can’t afford cynicism in gossip, all rumors are true.
The lanes guide my route, a soft drizzle with no wind on my head.
Fractured blue, broken green through the frosted windows, the raid occupies
Pre-coitus talk between husbands and wives, loyal giggles and roleplay,
Hushed whispers, the children are sleeping, morning school the next day.
And I? A college teacher in this mofussil sleep-walk?
Standing on the sidewalk, I guess the window of the women’s flat, the hall,
the bedroom.
Amritendu Ghosal has recently finished his PhD on alienation in the writings of Allen Ginsberg from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. Previously, he has worked as a Fulbright Scholar at Brown University. His poems have appeared in Visions, Shot Glass Journal, The Tipton Poetry Review, The Sunflower Collective, Volcano, Collage and some little magazines. He lives in Gaya, India and divides his time between teaching, research, poetry and music. He tries to convince himself to send out more poems to magazines.
