The bus proclaims the name aloud
In corporate blue—and rain siphons the syllables
Back into earth, as the pavement learns the weight
Of professional paces, and the low handrail above a false stream
Learns to reply in remorseless radiations
The precise temperature of administrative excellence.
A row of portable boards wheels virtues like trophies,
While castor leaves—enormous, impatient, but not yet redundant—
Fan the promises into a damp green laugh. They remember
An unbranded realm; their palmate hands tally the monsoon
Not quantitatively but immersed in rustic adoration.
Behind them, a culvert yawns in modular darkness—
Three black mouths, that swallow the university’s drainage
And small certainties from an archaic era,
Indeed, all of us who are here, by habit or by accident.
The sound of the bus door closes a memory:
A train in some nameless province, a child’s cough,
A sentence half-learnt, a moment frozen in time or
Behaving like a madeleine—not buttered cake but with the taste
Of wet concrete, the flash of a blue helmet
Left abjectly on a parked scooter like a votive.
Being here is to be made of details. The body remembers
The grit in one’s palm; the eye keeps counting bollards.
Or the knots in the scaffolding—the university is under perpetual
Apprenticeship—and behind it, a tower pretends to be the future.
The slender planted trees stand as trial greenery:
Bamboo or its theatrical cousins, lined up to make a skyline
Less unaccountable. Or, so that gardeners can water the idea of growth
While engineers corral stormwater into neatly squared openings.
Between smells of diesel and damp scripture.
Perception here is not theory but bruise: the sting of thorns,
The itch of grass at calves, the visual algebras of a campus
That wants new ivies and none else in its league;
For rhetoric to hang on its poles: on banners, at the traffic lights,
Or the black-and-white curb; where each syntax demands discipline,
Away from weeds born for revolution and dog-eared wildernesses
That know how to ignore curricula.
Yet, rebels inhabit the weather: a bleakness that luxuriates
Not as melodrama but burlesque, bourgeoning on relics of hunger;
A forecourt vacant at noon; a bus stationed like a gallery of aspirations;
Caged trash-bins bearing the university crest and locks that laugh
At pedagogy; foyers and passageways named after donors—
Whose trails tucked against an urban rural seam, and
A calendar of eminent lectures that refuse to salvage dreams—
Coexist like an indiscernible Kowloon walled city.
We learn to schedule loneliness: conferences at nine, grief at three;
An existential essay due before the autumn teaches humility,
And perimeters of pantomimes that harvest secrets like rainwater.
For Oxbridges are regalia—plausible, ill-fitting, sycophantic—
And futures sealed in brochures and brocaded prospects like
So many rollable boards. Meanwhile, at dusk, a line of lamp-posts
Keeps vigil over a make-believe boulevard; the bus exhales its heat
And the diurnal notes into a sky of soft grey; for these
Stubborn truths will live in our hands, in that particular way
In which the rain makes a name taste like the fragrant soil,
Or the numberless ways in which we cannot privatize the monsoon.
Arup K. Chatterjee 