The River Roads

(Poems about the Roads that the River builds)

Arjun Choudhuri

THE RIVER ROADS A COLLECTION OF POEMS IN ENGLISH Published (and print-facilitation) in India by PENTASECT

www.pentasect.com E-mail: [email protected] 91/A Baithakkhana Road Calcutta 700 009 Printed in India by CinnamonTeal Print and Publishing Private Limited Price Rs 60 (INR)/ $3 (USD)

Book cover designed by Pentasect Design Team E-text rendering by Pannalal Bhattacharjee (Silchar) Proofread by Pritam Bhattacharjee (Kolkata).
First Paperback Edition: 2009. ISBN: 978-93-80151-20-5

Copyright reserved by the author All rights are reserved. No part of this intellectual property may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the author.

The cover of the book shows a Shimul tree (a species of cotton) at the ruins of the Khaspur palace, a site of historical significance located a few miles away from Silchar. The photograph of the tree was provided by the author.

DEDICATION To the great river Barak, once called Borobokro, which flows near my known homes of solitude and remembrances while all the time, it whispers un-alike tales of homelessness and shadowy crematoriums to my ears and within my souls; and back in one homestead among many, to three dear Choudhuris, who had been and who will be forever named thus Pushparani, Arup, Arnav - lost forever to the sea, I give this book and all that it entails, living, dead or otherwise...

In the beginning, we spoke only words... and those became hearts dismal silently weaving worlds into the core of Life. Life that was deathly too

CONTENTS

A General Prologue Pages II to IV Poems Pages 1 to 43 (Borobokro Here Is All Earth, Borobokro Faith for the Past, Borobokro Befriended Timeless Friends, To Borobokro Autumnal, Borobokro It does have a Sea, Confessions to the River, Fires, across the River, Lakhas River Nights and Dusks, For the Lost Seedlings, The River at Crossroads, For an Afterwards Read, Midnights Moons, To a Goddess Crowned with Poppies, To a God Trying Hard For an Ontogeny, 5th January Bangla-BiharPragjyotisha, At Lands End, In Retrospect, A Distressed Dialogue with the Darkly Moon, F.R.I.E.N.D.S - The Last Seasons We Saw, Cinquains For Love and All Else, Haiku Moons, Haiku Issues, Haiku Respondez Sil Vous Plait, Ganga, Mosaic - On the Helm, At the Rounded Hallows, That Somersault, On Reading Anas Nins Henry and June, The Unknown Loves of the North Eastern Quarter, Evening Postulations - G. C. College, Deep Waters The Tithe of Dasami, This Could Be Heaven, Idle Silences, Futures Borobokro No More)

A GENERAL PROLOGUE
There are a few things I havent allowed myself to speak here, in these verses which, according to a certain Dr. Chatterjee (she commented even so once, during a rare cyber discussion), arent actually proper poems. She finds free verse a pity and listens to a lot of music. But then, every man, or woman, to their own beliefs. And I would love to live with mine. I not only like to think of these as poetry these verses also narrate the River and the homes I have lost and gained hence the name of the book and hence my obvious contention that these are poems. They succeed, I must say, to draw a finalised sort of attention from the reader, even the most amateur one. My first volume of poetry was published when I was studying for my postgraduate degree in English Literature at the local-central university of my hometown Silchar, situated twenty six kilometres inside the dense heart of Lower Assam, Barak Valley. I would have to thank Writers Workshop and Professor Purushottam Lal for that. The learned professor who reads out to the world even took time out to select an apt title for the book. But now as I look back, three years from then if I consider the calendar months, and a decade if I do not think on those terms at all, I find the entire thing very strange. Back then, there was elation, campus-renown and back-slapping adulation from some well-meaning people and sneers with sarcasm by some others. There was also something else a certain incertitude that grew around my opinions of what I had been able to say at all to those who were reading In the House Next Door and Other Poems (that first book I so plainly speak about here). That exists even now, only a bit more metamorphosed. I was clearly, not satisfied by my expressions then. I wondered, ever since, what was to be the way (and the means, and the method and the purpose as well) with poetry? Was it to be only music, known and unknown, wrought into a whole that would gush and even trickle forth from the words? Or was it to be the ideal narrative, combining past and future, within a vacillating present? There had to be something more than just these ideas. I wondered then and do so even now. I doubt that I will ever find a satisfying answer. And so, I continue, as of now, to play with my words, musing about them, bandying them about, twisting them, shaping them unsuccessfully, quite rarely otherwise, into rough visions of an imperfect nature. Such visions as would stem from a repertoire of agonisingly incredible remembrances. If I bring that particular thing into focus, the present volume concerns itself with my travels along the length and breadth of Barak, or Borobokro, my mother-river travels that were and are less mundane, physical, and more temporal. Quoting
I

Lee Falk, for all those who came in late, Borobokro is the name used in ancient or medieval records for the river Barak which lends its name to Barak Valley, the place where I was born. A few words more here, then - Barak Valley has had a very interesting and a very stormy history. It was one of the cultural frontiers where the Partitions, first of Bengal, and then India and then the exodus in 1971 exerted their individual influences, one after the other, in a rapid order of succession. It was also the central locale where the language movement for Bengali in India occurred, starting around 1961. Destabilisation, cultural and social, marks the history of Barak Valley in a rather strange way. And it continues to expand its efforts to confuse and confound, seeming almost alive in its ferocity, even now. The diaries about the river in this volume speak about this past, and more, as I feel it in my sensate lifeblood, blended into the predictive narrative of the future, if that is at all possible. I had included only a single poem about Borobokro in my previous book. It was then very well-received. So much so that people who read the book would actually care to ask me about it. I would reply to the best of my ability, trying hard to tell them about my mother-river the womb from where my memories were born. And I would constantly remind myself, the past need not necessarily be grand. It can be insignificant, commonplace and simple. It can be anything an afternoon with ones beloved by the river, the various sounds that emanate from around the rivers banks during the autumnal festival of the ten-armed goddess or even a drive across the bridge that spans it, on one particular moonlit evening, groping and clasping in a very modern manner. This sense of justice to the past I delved into, for the want of a better word, all the while trying to reconcile myself to the present that keeps on generating more of the said past. And thus I wrote these verses. All that took about two years. I was, I should admit, in a hurry to publish these verses. Otherwise, they would lose their claim over me. Publication would preserve them in time and immediate memory, just as it had been on the previous occasion, in 2006, with In the House Next Door and Other Poems. Having said all this, I find it utterly irrelevant at first glance, as many others would say too. But when I consider my feelings for my poetry (a poet necessarily has them, as an artist would, and should), I feel that I have not spoken in vain. This, one can consider and as I would say too, a fitting general prologue to The River Roads. And finally, a few acknowledgements that must be articulated in order to complete this digression
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The golden Swarnali Choudhuri, for everything ranging from support unconditionally provided to soup-of-vegetable-shards-and-chicken, thank you, Ma. Amitabha Dev Choudhury, for being the Sky Herald, Dr Dilip Kumar Barua, measure for measure, Dr Kabindranath Phukan, for a prediction of poetry, Soumitro Dev, poet and friend, also a brother, from across many shadowy lines, Dr Dipankar Purakayastha, for transformations, Dr Dipendu Das, for transmogrifications, Prof. Shyamali Kar, for attentions in time, Prof. Joydeep Bhattacharjya for the help that is silent but sure, Sagar Ray, for the pen and the canvas, Dipankar Khan and Elias Dirk across Golpark to Wimbledon, for pointing out obvious flaws and last but not the least, definitely, Simonti, Gargee and Ishanee for the unconditional accompaniment across thousands of miles, and so many delineations.

Kolkata Silchar Delhi Unreal City

III

BOROBOKRO HERE IS ALL EARTH

1. I am a body that lives in the house next door behind roving hands and scuttling, dying feet. I no longer seek to wander these tacit lands nor do I wish to know how, where I had been last a welcome addition to tired, hungry states. My eyes bathe you, engendered river, in showers of knowing created for you with the minute seas of known bodies. I am Borobokro I am you. My hate is your image on the banks you seek you seek living and a home, where concrete eggs of dreadful music would be one of your manifold banes during the season of rippling rains. My love is your body that binds you. It pays no heed to what else you would have been if there had been no walls, no reasons for seeking lost harbours. My name is yours a voice that spouts arrogance at all those intense labours to defy your gaoler breezes great winds worthy of life, death and defamed directions. My eyes are your words of utter despair singing plaints for plantain-made rafts that meander, flounder and are rent asunder, remains of them wafting ceaselessly here. For the body, the soul that I am, and more I know the world from my mothers lost grace with which she cut me into this reddened home this sphere, this road, this line-halved dome.

2. I know the shivers of the restless horizon and the moons of my restive nascence. I know it all yet I still persevere, for this indeed, O Borobokro that wherever is land and air and water and suns and moons and a dismal star, wherever is patience, and the urge to be, there is that which I know you are All that you are, I am too Living thus, Borobokro, I am you.

BOROBOKRO FAITH FOR THE PAST

1. Here were we made. We became our Earth we were borne, shaped and burnt asleep. Those who died and lived its denizens, and one mighty hole carved, closeted weaving itself all within centuries dim, dimmed forever, darkened, dismal. Rivers somnolent pacing thirsting hiding behind palls of floating fleshy sludge and tapestry-like languid waves throbbing at noon at hours unknown in the nights that which men would call only a river. Borobokro, beloved mate of unsung days, we have known you with silvered tongues and loved you for that and for more, we loved you to bits and moved around you in biding circles while building a stead or two. We remember you and say I do not know We have burnt our boats, all the while never trying to lose them to hate, while tyrants waving parchment swords rose as errant rays of darkness in our midst, spitting golden showers into the air, and casting glances about in delighted glee. These lurk even now, as would live a bloody sprite in the shadows behind and around the warrior. But this unsung Earth remains a land of paupers, a haven in silence for paupers progeny. Souls that hate love of life and of land and call the skies the roof above ones head. Souls that walk the shores beyond all seas as on the ground beneath the dead roving feet of each circle of stones that are supposedly living or even shadow-like on the walls of the past
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when innocent moonbeams strike every heart to rule and rout the voices of our truths. The banks drift past, singing in the past and I sing of the past along with them. We wade across certain uncertain sunrises and across times which bring to my mind memories of the barely breathing carcasses we devoured each morning since centuries. These bones dry now, beneath merciless skies each hour passing slow, still slow, yet slower with watching raindrops as large as eyes. Borobokro, forsworn flower of gentle monsoons, the body I am and the earth I was shall sing to you timeless tales of the dead and the vacillating sun in these dying skies and remind you of love with a single remission I do not know.

BOROBOKRO BEFRIENDED TIMELESS FRIENDS

These days I do not harm the bugs or the worms that creep so solemnly across my brains and my beds and the many bodies which I would love to call my own even once, once more. Out of the dense dirty dark comes a shivering expulsion that plays across the alien breezes - It is the rivers living call and it is time now that we must go The roads to the heart call out - O moon, O dawn, O sun. Dateless souls call out thus to the waiting breezes that shroud our river Borobokro of the densest senses, come here, stay here, play with us awhile in our dances of the nine patterns. Remember those moonbeams, the only ones that danced on your vested eyes, and then were mine, as vestments too, initially and then as vestiges of an unholy coupling, sung about joylessly in many a godless hour. O twisted friend, remember me and mine ours forever blued eyes washed by the waters of wronged wisdom. You live in mine, river, as do I in yours. Each watery eye therefore must be blue.

TO BOROBOKRO - AUTUMNAL
1. Several pots of honeyed homesteads drown the waters murmuring aloud and sustained simpering sounds of evening tales sung by the ear while all the dead days from the previous year arise in charmed sleep beneath the innocent Wain eagerly waiting each moment to be made again, until oblivion. We live as yet know that, Borobokro of swiftly wafting waters, always the river so calm, so wise 2. Naked arms twine turns of twisted hay. Strains beneath the soiled earth resound across the widened, wet yard very young piled with clay from closed clammy doors dead to daylight and homely hearth hymns. Songs and souls drifting to a darkened door some mere abysses that the waters conjure as veils that varnish the tenth wholesome day that hails the train of the departing daughters; the gargantuan sons and the wretched watchers. We wait for all that and wait evermore 3. One avid night dark, brilliant, moonless, painted a dream for that innocent youth who actually saw his life take shape beyond the shreds of these silent streets and long dead lively nightly lights.
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No fear of forbidden but lasting love forming, no dread of an awesome death deforming eyes and years; only an endless darkness with the river wise, silent, living but softly maturing 5. The endless caches of secretive nilkantha1 birds mistaken by us for mere homing pigeons made him their own while you, calm river made him your wretched lover who would shower upon you lamps-leaves-fragrant flowers in a daze of ceaseless hope and earnest prayers. 6. Borobokro of the bent banyans, our river spanned by a single broken bridge You who have played so many parts in countless lives across endless ages, you will know what we dare to know, river calm and always wise, flowing softly beside the softest breezes. Here beneath the autumn sun, what do we look for? O Borobokro, the one dead leaf that gave you your name and nothing more.

Nilkantha a small species of bird with bluish feathers found often in Bengal.
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BOROBOKRO IT DOES HAVE A SEA

Those verses we wrote in medieval May were lost to the fiery winds of Borobokro that came to us hard, too hard indeed and with no stone unmoved went back home. As early as the denuded hour of the night we had feared originally That which would set in soon enough for us to die in it was there indeed. Denied our last sacraments, we left our nests those that had been refused to us in life and seemingly so fetched away from us even in soundless death. We did sing of so many things the birth of a sea or the rising of a mountain. We had cringed at the spittle of a cow, the seed that was a leaf, the land that rises now. That eight-petalled land we walked on in music was song-less enough for these songs to be born. We were for love and the verses we had sung were evidence enough that the end had come, if not too soon, quite in time. The river we adored was our daughter in distress. It angrily shivered and was turbulently calm. And when we left for the unreachable shores, the river our daughter uttered syllables of rest. We had promised her so many a thing and gifted her many a life. And when we left, without sacraments, the river our daughter made us a gentle promise
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that wafted about silent and waited for us to cross those last lines of familiarity. The river our daughter promised us woe and fulfillment together in a single vow. In fulfilling those, she crept about Borobokro, would-be procreatrix of a thousand still-born lands, uttering syllables once again familiarizing us, in love and painful knowing. We, the failed rising ones, the dead-boned dead of the luckless land, we watched the river dance and triumph over the dark the ultimate shroud that waving darkling did herald our journeys end.

CONFESSIONS TO THE RIVER

O ponderous river, listen, for we are bold lovers, hating love in summer heat, lily-livered Fridays in tow we walk on masculine pavements in great feminine, more asexual cities, and end up as traders, scholars, mostly priests of misfortune. Even artists, writers, hapless poets film producers, and liberators too, but no single ripple on the wakeful breast of this heart-river in each soul that we are survives for us, nor beats-bleeds for us. All that humiliation and anxiety, becomes a womb of verity. And so we pass on, we live, and then divide, to dye the soil with each soil-splattering cell.

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FIRES, ACROSS THE RIVER

1. The tree waiting beside the river hungers for a brand of cooling fire in spite of its waves that drench and wash the silent living land speaking in green linguistics of its somnolent end and of the dead flowering-fires; they heard gunshots slung to the heartless eye as postal asses bore the impression of the sky that was written in bold letters singularly black each raised name shouting from heaven and back. We have known seen lived what can be and what is; each name in our heart cemented as an engraved iris that shifts this way and that but particularly fails to discern and await the densely flowering rails, in subtending April and pullulating May. 2. Across the river, the spanning bridge cowers, the heart of the land quaking in linguistic shivers. The loss of a land gave us this hateful name and thus were these fires born of our shame.

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LAKHAS RIVER NIGHTS AND DUSKS1

The river wafted by and such was the song of blessed eyes that I made it a habit to watch how the bent banyan brooded silent passive, questing over each passing sigh. Night - it was our demesne, and days were out of mercy made part of our being or what we were and what we would become, soon motes of dust fleeing all alien hands and onto far-off lands of bridges and host-rivers-running-vast endless as time itself. I was made a watercraft when all others had faded in a ray of divining light striking across thresholds. I was never a passage-ford-meadow for the violated dust that breaks down from those additive furtive folds of that land afar staring hard away from my hands but gazing at me a blood traitor from bloodied lands.

Lakha is a linguistic corruption of the word Lakhindar, from the famous couple of folklore, Behula-Lakhindar
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FOR THE LOST SEEDLINGS

These are rivers sempiternal sprouting waning life religiously grasping lives by their horns with many song-less hidden vows to rise and wait for all surfacing hands stretching out to horizon-less lands to sough only seeds in raised rows endlessly originating and hiding in boats which rise in keeping with each deforming year and simpering soundless banana-skin floats that replace the hours in a nameless fear of times when the sun goes weak in the knees and when the rivers decide to make merry, in crematoriums urban roads cultured seas of undulating raucous lives grown weary Our fate yours and even of those in late these be rivers eternally ended, lost even to fate, endlessly continuing, all ceaselessly, all seamlessly.

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THE RIVER AT CROSSROADS

From what I have learnt with the sun, the winds and other storms, I can say this - if we had met any sooner, you would not have been this vast heart flanked on all three sides by the countless rivers that each of your tributaries are. I am one such river too. But not yours to nourish or rule or destroy at the wink of an all-seeing eye or at the behest of the strangest clouds that occur beside you, behind us before us. We would have been a treaty boxed in by heart-failed-by-moons and the physiognomy that would be thus inspired would be one of apparent shame and deep-down-inside laving love or apparent lust formed by dusty anthills of memories. I have returned to your vastness. But I have returned as you, O river. Or even greater than you hated Ganges beloved Ganga1 and now as I remain at ready to merge with you, knowingly destroying my senses and the freedom that I have achieved in love and hate you rebuff me and ask me about this Did we ever agree upon this to happen?. Dismal cremation grounds decorated with fairy lights survive by their own volition even as an endless procession of dark chariots bearing knights in daylight-lit armours riding often to death and destruction and often to a desirable clasp of arms heavy with beauty or lightened by the labour of the world we know pitted in a duel against the world we have yearned for and do so even now. The world has been made free but not enough for you and me for even now injunctions survive, at the smallest gesture made by tired, tiresome eyes.

Ganga, or Ganges referring to the river Ganga that originates in Gomukh and flows across India. The river is worshipped as a goddess and its supposedly holy water used for many unique purposes by the Hindus.
1

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FOR AN AFTERWARDS READ

One moment is enough to eclipse a lifetimes moon. One song would be enough to win a losing struggle One glance had been enough to tear hearts asunder. One ray of yours has been enough to breathe life in me, O Daughter, O renowned co-wife. And, O great moon whom we adore on the banks of our great mother-river, these my lands here and across these eyes are offerings made in stealth and in availing of furtive chances, I call upon you to bear witness that these my crimes are justified. Prevent my saying so, if you will, but this is all that is true of you and me. You rise in dreams and live in them. I live and I die and decay in them as well.

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MIDNIGHTS MOONS 17TH APRIL 2006

1. My midnights made of a single colour, I love, unidentified this is peace, a synapse beyond time, Lethe1, or even Berlin2, or even the road crossing trembling in orange knowing as a single wagon rides by. 2. I revere my pride and dubieties that take toll on mortal loving and assume curt consciences, all in a secret knowing. Do you feel the same for my secret breath? Rising-waving-shining-blue-Moon-so-black returning to all directions ten as they say evading laws all along the way. 3. You think these innocent clouds conceal your face? And you mistake my breath of a night-queen bloom for pining love and mischievously intone I rule over you till death makes us part. My midnight knowledge is not witchcraft not even knowing the snakes forked tongue.
Lethe - (from Greek mythology) a river in Hades; the souls of the dead had to drink from it, which made them forget all they had done and suffered when they were alive.
1

Berlin - Capital of Germany located in eastern Germany. But here, it connotes Irving Berlin, United States songwriter (born in Russia) who wrote more than 1500 songs and several musical comedies (1888-1989).
2

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If you would have known that you too would have sung the song of kinship the departing day had won in peace and knowing of the present and the past, from the eyes that bind our fates, a tad bit boastful of the evening last. But do you yet feel that ancient way? Shining-shimmering-powwowing-poisonous-Moon

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TO A GODDESS CROWNED WITH POPPIES

1. You would have thought this day to be one that would be so normal and peaceful at heart but marvels never arrive in twos and threes but only in ones and singles, very lonesome. We have given up breaths and have talked in densely smoked rooms, so dimly lit, about the one whom life, longing and love made a goddess or a daughter of one; and called that perfect work of art, a warrior-sun, a golden sun or simply a moon-loved one. 2. We loved deeply in the initiated hours of the descending night; our objective observation dealing with the zodiacal love of the confused ram and the feisty goat who loved a maniac Wasnt this just nice? This, dear observing Goddess, is confounding enough, I hope?

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TO A GOD TRYING HARD FOR AN ONTOGENY

1. This was my way of saying goodbye and goodnight. If you would at all want to know, it was a goodbye, whatever the cost, to history and to my created warpath of mooning nightly lights which shield your dense quotes from Shakespeare or even Jonson without the h. 2. This is a book? You think this is a book? A book has a few pages with fresh inky swathes writing down things in eyes. This does not have even a single one. While, there was some murmuring about rivers, some about the zeitgeist and a little conjecturing about the nature of ghost-writing. I remember that I do not want to but that I have to shake hands with you. But, you know what tires me? It is not the fact that I bear your yokes more firmly than had been expected of me. It is the reality, the romance of it that I find so dark, and so donnish.

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5th JANUARY BANGLA1-BIHAR-PRAGJYOTISHA2

These walks in meddled-with midway-earth were once actually important for us we who have no more to hide or wait or seek shelter from. Here are rivers or rain or sun or pestering, festering storms. Songs of midway-earth rising as mists before the leveled eyes we have left. Gifted earth of bleached-boned-fathers-long-gone the birth of each son-eggshell-fledgling all song defies. reddened eyes - reddened earth maddened knowing of twisted shivering life Silent Life is silenced by the boom-boom of fossilized guns and the faint giggles of a lily-white cow. But this, I deny you, for you are a cowering river.

1 2

Bangla Bengal.

Pragyotisha Literally, land of the eastern lights. An ancient epithet for Assam or Kamarupa.

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AT LANDS END
This land is a vulture-ridden carcass, peace into a hundred odd pieces undone. Evenings, mornings, dusks and lands sunsets, risings and falling-aparts. These parables of succumbing ancient dawns tell us metaphoric risings are mere aubades1 Songs of impatient love No more worlds or spices or princes or potentates impotent or powerful. (As written down in ancient ark-hidden scrolls and shining compact discs made of paperback lives) Paper, I would say, is an idiotic invention But a good one, a clever ruse by misomousoi2 hating smiles tears erratic deliberations and falling falling leaping rising lives. Killing many toucans with a single slingshot Most important is hate and then proper Piri Reis maps legacies of moons and nights3.
Aubades An aubade is a poem or song of or about lovers separating at dawn. It has also been defined as "a song or instrumental composition concerning, accompanying, or evoking daybreak."
1 2 3

misomousoi Literally, poet-hater; in Sir Philip Sidneys An Apology for Poetry

Piri Reis (Hadji Muhiddin Piri Ibn Hadji Mehmed) was an Ottoman-Turkish admiral, geographer, pirate and cartographer born between 1465 and 1470 in Gallipoli on the Aegean coast of Turkey. He is primarily known today for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-i-Bahriye (Book of Navigation), a book which contains detailed information on navigation as well as extremely accurate charts describing the important ports and cities of the Mediterranean Sea.
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Digging digging digging below seas Years of a thousand days each Towers of petroleum caked in mud high on Arab shores. Arab queen Shahzadi1, we wend our way through your stories of blinding, binding night incomplete with a bloody dawn nearing soon to turn into a bloodless meeting. Poisonous refrains also arise as petrol fumes from a burning mound of animal skins lying paper-like, thin, restored and revived; in the midst of evenings mornings dusks and sunsets Risings and fallings fallings far far apart. You, singular friend, are my particular bane making me do things that are never parliamentary. To speak of the self is a dangerous passion, to live in there is one even more. Given the fact that passions survive You know what it is to be like; while awaiting a smile, and then a kiss under the ministrations of the purest eye.

Shahzadi A character from the The Arabian Nights Shahzadi or Scherezade.

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IN RETROSPECT MAY 29, 2007

Have you met the last of the Friends? As departing days and dimmed dusks paste their stories of pale perversion onto the ontogenies that our lives hate. Have you been to these our homes and hearths awash in the spittle of the rising roused river? Have you seen how the moon maidens merge and dance to death these our deathless quarters? Thus, there is one important message yet to be known and ably understood But those who knew and preferred not to speak are lying home deadened, come this days end These day-ends that we adore so quaintly in sleep and song and silent longing are homilies uttered digressively by fair-faced heirlooms, all too beautifully. We have lost our secured breaths to monkey-faced hearts obnoxiously slippery, so sleepy moonshine so silvery-blue ineptly portrayed as lost car-parts. We have also known furtive smells and silent kisses in a youthful decline. Today, however, is another day-end. Very unknown, unwed, unread, at an end spent in fearful peace in this bedimmed land where stars shower shamefaced warping wind-rains and absolute sex grinds out multi-versioned prints of song and dance with clashing cycles
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This end of days is not one of the spawn the shapely shapeless rohu1 calmly gave birth to. Not even a tenth day, or a fourteenth night beyond the black moon which is not yet arrived. This end is one that we bore to bodies Bodies that were watery, slimy with lands enraptured. This end we lost and this end we won without a single battle of words.

Rohu (Labeo rohita) is a fish of the carp family Cyprinidae, found commonly in rivers and freshwater lakes in and around the South Asia and South-East Asia.
1

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A DISTRESSED DIALOGUE WITH THE DARKLY MOON

1. You know how I have written and sung endlessly smitten by your lights lazy lances while awaiting your dark, limiting glances across hearts like ours, and yours, brightest moon of mysterious nights. And I have known what it is when hands reach out soft in the gathering gazing dark across simple homespun and a stubble-laden cheek a soft, seemingly womanly palm. 2. In these days of cold confused hearts I wait, and sing endlessly of waiting and songs never more fulfilling beneath your shady rays, Blackest-apostle-who-we-mortals-call-a-moon Songless you are, dark Moon, but for us, there is lasting patience and unnatural climatic conditions here reign as the golden complexity of the lost knight dawns before your eyes and even mine. No mere rhetoric can this be, no mere romanticising of lexemes, only a scissure, a beaten reason. You loved a sun but forgot the moons religion to shine on, albeit in borrowed light. But I do not blame you and only this I would say, forget it though as you may,
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(However, do not forget those many restive nights.) Remember, only, as I said that hopeful stubble-laden cheek, that shelterless length of homespun winding around all language and most winsome nights misspent around a table with Brechtian chairs and near-Arcadian eyes. I do agree, dark Moon, with the Prince when he moans - The rest is silence.

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F.R.I.E.N.D.S - THE LAST SEASONS WE SAW

Here is a song that I wanted to sing at a fare-well concert. I know no peace for piecemeal productions no air for our aerial Antonio. who saw it seemingly safe to silence his soul and emit his eyes onto an enchanted road. He who was song-filled-silent-still and made of vows so that vrouws would laud his quiet nonchalance. We taught him nothing, yet no noise saw I or we, who showed him our hours and he went up the hill and here are my Jack and Jill. Jack in Delhi grazing on the grass. Jill in silly Silchar, expecting mnage to the house next door. These stymies continue and with joy - the girl-goddess reaps richer grain, richer rain or poignant pain and implied varsity showers our Caramel, here again sing some more birdsongs of rain. some on-pain, or some about me.
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Of buses we knew quite a lot and of broken down roads and of trees which seemingly rot beneath goads adamantine made of silent moon-songs. Denial, they say, is such a pleasure only if it provides enough agony. You knew as I, well enough to treasure your thoughts in seeming prose; if any, these were the best photographs for that year. Business apart, then, do not eschew them, the earnest ones who dared, and those as well who did not and who with their heads bared stood beneath the trees which rot even now, and maybe even more in the distant Karimganj-ish future. In deepest Kojaguri this year, we learnt how true these ramblings had been, once unknown, mostly very much unseen. But as they descended, and as they fell, at every twist of that rotund conch shell, each step ahead was most keenly felt, as the twice edgy knife-saw shaped as a welt that draws out a bangle at every turn and waits till the red has decided on an urn and then ends its existentialist being as Nabarun Herbert on a cat-bat wing. Do you think you can do the same and should I ask you, What is in a name?
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Wander home, o lonely cloud, o song-less brood of sun and storm, we have waited long enough for that which was but now is not. Someone silent sings your songs vested in a veiled vagary. That which came but never left was love indeed but that bereft of flowers gentle blooming blossoms waving hard breezes all but never heard till our songs reached you. We have lost our fields of woe and our hopes on iron bridges that rest on dreams easier dreams which meander in and pass through hopeless eyes casting die of sleep. We wander home, o silent cloud. Home is where your dreams breed.

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CINQUAINS FOR LOVE AND ALL ELSE

1. Two days. In between is then and now and all else. Love no longer a vision, but a death. 2. Rivers flowing swift here waft home blood-song and life between moons, valleys and homes lost in strife. 3. For, red is the colour of the rousing flowers. Thus we die in glorious May each year. 19th May Martyrs Day - Silchar1

In Barak Valley and elsewhere too, 19th May is celebrated every year as Language Martyrs Day. It was on this day, in 1961, that eleven people lost their lives while attempting a satyagraha against the infamous Language Bill passed by the Legislative Assembly of Assam during then..
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HAIKU1 MOONS
1. Moon turning, turning, silently what keeps you so far hidden, and why? 2. The blackened eyes of the harvest moon gloat in glee. Why do we not see? 3. Roads I have sent you off on are roads after all O Moon, you shall walk on. 4. These upturned clouds you play with and think that the rains forget. You blaspheme.

These haiku were first published in Sristi, an online literary journal. It can be accessed at the following web address - www.sristi.com.
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HAIKU ISSUES
1. In a shaft of morose daylight the white rose broods and wonders why how. 2. Eastern lights unfulfilled dawns dreams restored homes of hearts at this hour. 3. This red hammer is a unique one. Keep it hidden Do not speak now. 4. The Empress knew her failings and dropped down dead Who could have foretold this? 5. Out of this forced synapse of sun-sight emerges a new-fangled light. 6. Love for my eyes hate for singled out suns: dead in swiftly rising dusks

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HAIKU RESPONDEZ SIL VOUS PLAIT

1. Now living I utter and cease living in my increate ecstasy. [To E.D while stopping for Death] 2. These chairs we enact dead ones, the living evade rationality. [To Brecht Baku and bread] 3. You who shroud your face in white Do you hear the passing of moonless nights? [To Mrs. R.C.] 4. Modified stones? Fate benumbed and the pipers now effortlessly blow. (To the daughter of Shukra1)

Shukra - The preceptor of the demons in Hindu mythology. Here the reference has been made to Devyani, the daughter of Shukra.
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GANGA
I was made of water and skies and clothed in the tears of a thousand moons. I was fed the laughter of rivers and housed in the fears of a thousand homes. I was born, but I never died. I walked with the shadows and within them too. I rose from songs and fled into them. Generations after I spoke of myself, you speak of me as if you were me. I, a dead shell of negligence, grow and still grow on my own wild banks. Messy, mossy lives marred mud baths in the sacred months and moons of light and more of that there from where it all came. I am the land, the living in it and the life. They who live in me shall never die.

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MOSAIC - ON THE HELM

Constant deliberations that I have made about that unique afternoon, and evening weigh down upon me - as does a shade that bears down silently - a part of being a tree, all alone and still steady, but outworn within a singularly worked-upon garden. Someone waited for a cemetery to materialise and wanted, furthur, a brief brush to evolve a satisfying figure that this name would realise as a conquest, less said - and would revolve about nothing more odious than a pair of brown lips. Then, should I be silent, silenced by an erratic demand made fancifully? Or should I be hopeful? Entranced by only a faint hope, wishing dutifully for fulfillment from a white-livered lily wresting so painfully with the tentacles that it itself conjures within-without-all about those dark spectacles balanced skilfully.

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AT THE ROUNDED HALLOWS AUGUST 20TH, 2009

(For the seconded pupils-people GCC, English) Red rain in the drowning day seeks cold pleasure in driving hearts to a coarse death. Rain of seasonal turbulences, unreasonable, wafting, across heart-wide oceanic regimes vast, very silent, and with cloud-messengers bearing to many homes a deathly wreath of longing and of knowing. Red-as-can-be rain, beloved of waters, of the earth and of the heart, and a sum of seized songs of surrendered souls red, so-red rain. A crafted song here for the rain that seeps through most senses and sweeps through the valley of the heart as that river we adored loved asked for and lost, forever.

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THAT SOMERSAULT
Such strident notes as this would not follow except for a lapse that could be called simply uncalled for or even more horrid a name. Across the wide expanses of this green canvas, there are strips of golden that somehow resemble a leap, or a somersault. Annie Besant not at all, not an angel, not a demon, neither a Pope, nor a bride of the tempted lecher she called it a mans paradise. I mistook her advances for a natural root-quest of rivers and nests and also, a stony stone or two. I made a mistake, indeed. That somersault I remember as in my arms I hold another body of peace and red bliss lawfully declared to be dear to my heart and to my designs. Good morning, lost green paradise.

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ON READING ANAS NINS HENRY AND JUNE

Red body if you look at the earth that is no earth at all but a mistake Red body if you touch the stones that were jewels once but are beaten to pulp often, off and on, against hollowed hallowed grounds where Edens are borne Red body if you make slight changes in tasks that remind me of a howl in the night Red hours but if you touch a brand of smog glowing in the darkened recesses of this room that was once a sanctuary of ignorance but now is a home full of books and the world next door. Red hours if you sleep tight beneath stars and cradle your hand in my possessed arms. Red songs these would have been if only you had been a gate, truly leading into worldliness, and then I would have been a neophyte , a goddess you would have been truly ending in death.

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THE UNKNOWN LOVES OF THE NORTH EASTERN QUARTER

I called you twice, you did not answer. Was it that busy a road you walked on? The cars screech endlessly. The drains gurgle on. It's monsoon once again let us sing our song its time already. Then again, such is the law, no heart teems without sacrifice in this foolish world of material awe where love is a paradise. Do not debate my words, friend, for these are deceptive tears in the end. I myself do not believe them - but do believe in the heart's call.

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EVENING POSTULATIONS, G. C. COLLEGE

You would have hated my remonstration at the proposal you made, dear Caligula1. This name too, you deserved it but hated and you waited for my last song of unction. This road that teems with heat and skid marks and the intense vapours of this evening that are marks of sin made in joyful knowing of intimacy within the withering embrace of the dusky Safari all of these are remembrances of you Caligula, dearest friend and tenderfoot foe, I rejoice in these scrapes with the past while some Mitchell drones on. The rest of the moment is made of utter silence. Songs there have been there will be more of them. Lives there had been but you would have none of them. Often, so often would words tumble off this brigade of living and dying alternately. And you would ask me What is the use? Where is the necessity? How? Why? Questions by the ton would descend upon my weakness for you, dear Caligula now departed to the greatness of my Rome of unrequited rotations Though, as of now, we await your memoirs that you have written off in our hearts, rising as mists, descending as the kisses of winter mornings, meandering as the breezes across the naked college grounds, silenced and powerful yet as the creeping Sunday evenings, obscenely somnolent as those rakish bodies which as crows in the evening eagerly pose as would be paramours in these familiar corridors that melt upwards and down again. I have supplanted the singular with the common, Caligula, and have descended into this abscess called a home, for you. I wait at these wrought gates of sickening, familiar familiarity and I pine for the past of perfect comfort our times, Caligula.
Caligula was a Roman emperor who succeeded Tiberius and whose uncontrolled passions resulted in manifest insanity. Here the name is a nom de guerre for an acquaintance of the speaker in the poem.
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DEEP WATERS THE TITHE OF DASAMI1

Such wayward waters as these would have been a crime for even those Noahs who have been constant creations of a god or two across the bundles of timely time spans that we love to adore as passages of questionable history. I have been one such wizened, wisened wisdom seeker whose life has been measured in pillars of salt or pepper. I have been a boatman weeping invisibly for the waters that stretch and stretch out too far between years and ages. I have watched these rivers grow and incessantly die with me and my wasted vigils of hopeless hoping and nocturnal music. I have been my own gods pantheons drizzling into dust and merging into the pavements where multitudes mill about. I have been waters of the heart too and of the womb confusedly wafting about wending my ways into this tomb. I have been homes and hearths, thresholds of song-filled hunger once laden with rivers of milk and honey and bloodied bodies. I too have been a human, with pain and pride. I too would have been a master of my senses.

Dasami - The day on which the autumnal Durga puja in Bengal is concluded amidst fanfare and the immersion of the idols of the ten armed goddess Durga.
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THIS COULD BE HEAVEN1

(The Queens Song) Thrusts in the ragged fabric that times wear in swathes and singled loops would be this song and its other bodies too. Things we had eschewed in eternal boredom would have been our faces strung along this song and its other fates too. This lovely synapse could have been yours and mine as well to deal with and live with and this song could be heaven too. In these days of unfortunate deception, in these hours of calculating disorder, in these streets of coldness and warmth, this song could be heaven too. These words so often mistaken to be spells of insanity and parched language, and love could have been otherwise a passage to paradise a haunting of hearts a fury of friendship a laxity of loves. This could be heaven too.

The title of this poem is a line from a well-known song by Queen.

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IDLE SILENCES
They weep these idle silences that stretch unendingly towards some periphery, some stony wall of brick or mud, some unknown boundary. They wait, too these silences even when the night has ended the world and its perfect senses in a charade of closed doors that are not doors but true walls. They water these living bodies that are you and me with sheets of icy fear and warm insecurity in these dense cat-like evenings that meander through our worlds. These silences, benign, restlessly restful, strike a sound bargain with continuity.

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FUTURES BOROBOKRO NO MORE

Borobokro, beloved lover of oft-sung days, I salute your receding hairline that swathed your truly affectionate caresses, your lays that have remembered me and have bathed me in a obtusely critical knowing. I salute your shady banks, you, o chasm, being the mother of innumerable progeny that die ceaselessly without the passage of lives, living in you I have borne nothing but hatred, my eye, roving seamlessly, quests for you. You, ancient queen of boats and bridges, hide in some confusing labyrinth of once-green trees, while I shun your tear drenched loves and bide on these departing barks that once were bodies and now are past memories of being. Silent creeps in that distant horizon, mother, even as you said farewell to my fated services. Only the love that you bear for my brother remains, as a cold past surrounds the crevices of memory that shall be my futures, indeed. Indeed, Borobokro, no more of the songs I have sung to appease your fearful moods. Futures, Borobokro, or faces of the past, these shall, from now on, be no longer you.

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