I
Wind-blown drupes of rain, like violet hysteria,
rattle her pink raincoat—she leans, her umbrella,
a mangled petal, against the motorbike’s
throbbing hum, fear in a handful of dust.
The train skirts the Subarnarekha, rain-lashed currents
surging below girders, a river rises to kiss the track ballast.
II
Under the skeletal overbridge, headlights sputter—
a restless marrow of iron, loose rivets
murmuring like drowned Phoenicians in Eliot’s waste.
Trackside metaphors pulse in each metallic sigh.
III
At the level crossing, a queue like scattered stanzas—
women in sallow cotton, men with clay-eyed pots
brimming green saplings, children clasp tickets like dreams.
A distant whistle rattles girders, elephants tremble.
Santhal voices murmur prayers, their bamboo baskets
still dripping rain, echoing the forest’s verdant cathedral.
IV
Beaten tracks curve over the forgotten tor—
a lone figure ascends, coat sodden with quicksilver pools;
each footprint a silver chalice for July’s
unceasing granules, in a temenos of sorrow.
V
Below, wet fields ripple—caverns of undulating puddles
where raindrops quiver like stilled frog breath.
Date palms bow beneath the monsoon’s benediction,
southern ghosts transplanted to Jharkhand’s iron soil.
On the Chaibasa-Dangoaposi ore line, emerald forests riot,
Mundari children gaze at us through emerald bamboo curtains.
VI
Coal-black heaps press against trembling dawn; steam pulses
through these veins—train exhalations carve shards
of twilight from monsoon’s gray vault,
ash-stained petals drifting on track rivers.
VII
Platforms lie scattered, crimson benches weep rust,
sand shoals bridge rails to nowhere; unfinished
viaducts gape like Pound’s fractured Cantos,
limestone quarries cough fog into bruised skies.
VIII
Here, mist reigns; mountains loom as fortresses,
sanctuaries of pachyderm rumination.
The air tastes of damp decay, memory and machine—
clack-clack of wheels echoing hollow men.
IX
Empty goods wagons clatter like dead metronomes,
loose sleepers strewn by careless poets.
Wet paddy mirrors iron skies; green water
pools in clay chalices, luminous with latent prayer.
X
Women at six ‘o’ clock stand sentinel in ankle-deep reflections;
umbrellas rare as rain-stained promises.
An orphaned auto rickshaw waits, its yellow
smile petrified in monsoon’s indifferent gaze.
Behind them, the thick sal groves drip with moisture,
their broad leaves gesturing to ancient Adivasi rituals.
XI
Buffalos thrash in tawny-pink lagoons; a shepherd
in pistachio hat breathes life into bronze hides.
Cows graze in rivulets as goats tethered
on dwarf balconies bleat ragged chorales.
XII
Adivasi hamlets garbed in blue and orange tarpaulin—
tribal flags against lust-green sprawl; banyans loom,
their Sanskrit names lost on the tongue,
roots weaving cathedrals over fissured cartographies.
XIII
Petulant engines mute these idylls from our sight,
whistles summoning Victoria’s ghosts from days of steam
As phantom cars vanish into monsoon’s
patient recrudescence, in a scourge of memory.
A brake test halts at Chiria Bridge, the torrential Ranga River
roiling far below in jade currents laced with silty rain.
XIV
Power-grid towers puncture verdant vaults,
lattice spines humming like Jibanananda’s sunken rivers.
Thatched roofs of red clay glisten; stray black goat
and riderless bicycle both get wet, both hold vigil.
XV
Roads dotted by rare umbrellas guide our gaze
to small schools crouched near moss-laden lagoons,
peeling posters of banned fairness creams—city dreams
bleeding into moorland realms.
XVI
A masala chai seller threads through this fugue—
clay cups steaming like Hungryalist incantations,
bitter sip awakening memory and machine.
We drink the monsoon’s bittersweet epiphany.
XVII
An old man pedals by jaded by his umbrella,
his bicycle carving rivulets in mud—his shadow a stanza
of fragile resilience. And just like a mirage, we lose
him to the rain’s swift choreography.
XVIII
In oily sheen of passing lamps, a hesitant promise glistens:
an orange umbrella’s bloom, a whispered farewell
caught in the lantern glow of distant cars,
the couple’s motorbike fading down drenched horizon.
XIX
Monsoon’s corridors converge in this moving frame—
the pastoral and profane entwined in steel and clay,
where April’s ghosts meet July’s torrents,
and a seedling stirs beneath the fractured canopy.
XX
Between ruin and rebirth, our carriage roars
through an epic of transience—each line of track
a modernist tessera, each drop of rain
a scattered syllable in an eternal hymn that keeps railing us
Back to the railroads, for old sake’s sake
Arup K. Chatterjee 