A red garb hangs like an announcement,
Across the iron rail—a small pedestal to weather,
And parsimony! A man sleeps on a raised plank,
His back folded like a register stared by a clock,
As if sanctioned by laminated Ganeshas that the poor
Hang in shrines that take roots inside cracked plaster.
Rickshaws cough on half-lit noons,
Paper fans, rusted poles, egg cartons, and fidelity;
A circularity of spasms, complaints, cures, and flatterers!
Inside this open house, barefooted savants
Know more than the wisdom showered from lecterns;
Here the ascetic and the libertine quarrel
Not over the Upanishads but earthworm fossils.
The walls peel off like old confessions,
With a genealogy in every flake;
Staining noble lineages; the triumph of hunger
Over honor. The city you seek in ordnance maps
Is illumined on the ribs of its dwellers,
And its paradoxes live in their marrows:
Of telephones without numbers,
Of mortgaged stores selling sugary consolations,
Of liminality as scripture; what gets mended becomes a prayer.
Do not talk to them of great doctrines but observe
The slow arithmetic of intoxicated hands,
Of goblets that break the sterile sermons,
Of chipped off patinas and calendars,
Of wires that hang like ephemeral nests,
Beneath a low ceiling, like the season’s small elegy.
Of shutters breathing sideways—a row of wooden lungs,
Of each louver that admits dusk prematurely in this home,
Of catechisms of rusted latches and ventilated speech,
And a yellow numberplate that just fell short of salvation.
Photograph courtesy: Ayan Bose, Pixabay.
Arup K. Chatterjee 