The burden of straw pages bound and spined and loaded
Inside two quivering nylon bags—not a conscience stirs
From one to the other compartment, thickly boarded—
From quarter to quarter of newsreading passengers.
The feeble hawker shuffles his bags from one to the other row,
While a child nudges his mother’s wedding ring,
And slyly reaches out for the bookseller’s elbow—
Across the aisle come chafing, chronicles from Boston to Beijing.
Some ogle, some yawn, some finger the titles like an illicit rendezvous,
Some tuck in a paragraph, like a kiss stolen by the vestibule.
Someone paints a waylaid station bench, cast away from our view,
Someone cringes from a cookbook that reminds of molded tidings of a Yule.
A multitude of sordid ideograms, and stacks
Of vowed and aborted qualms, howl about,
The bookseller’s fingers. The child turns back
His gaze from the bookseller to my whereabout.
There’s a mole above his temple, and there
Is patient worship in his eyes for my journey’s solitude.
He will soon be learning that books are where
On our vilest sins, saintly our fictions brood.
The raven platforms—where the weddings of flurry and defeat
Of nondescript families that part in parodic anxiety—
And the green ponds of rural Bengal from the clotting dusk retreat;
The bookseller crouches by the door and a heap of mashed cups of tea.
He watches the murky crossings pass, and acres and acres of twilit creeks
Ramshackle cars in urbane towns, a ramshackle bridge on a dead river;
The summer evening cools the mire of his cheeks,
The soot of his eyes, and a reddened liver.
I ask him a question I’ve never asked, ‘Are you married?’
‘Two sons,’ he tells me. He can read somewhat, but can’t write to save his life.
He pops in an areca nut to soothe his gut, and has tarried
Two bangles in a newspaper for his wife.
His days are coins numbered like beads in a rosary coated
By the salt of so many rains, the grease of so many grimy palms;
Each clink is a slim volume of newfangled axioms niftily noted,
Before the train exhales us into separate maps or books of psalms …
Arup K. Chatterjee 