The expenses of loneliness & loving the darkness

3-Feb-08
The expenses of loneliness. A five kilometre trip to the city to get a newspaper. Nine rupees worth sweets consumed in the course of circling around the liquor shop debating whether to buy that pint bottle of rum or not. Two pirated CDs, one of ghazals of Jagjit Singh and the other of Kill Bill parts 1&2 dubbed in Hindi when what I wanted was a porn flick; even a stupid, coarse and revolting Indian one would do. And that pint bottle of rum. Two hundred and twenty seven rupees.

Found the connection to Rakesh after 26 years last evening. Deepak was found after 14 years and I didn’t want to meet him. I didn’t want to change the impression I had of our university days. Like I hadn’t gone back to Darjeeling since I was thirteen in 1971.

Indulging in loneliness. Accepting this transfer on promotion in the first place. And not going home this Saturday. Not that I didn’t want to. But the boss doesn’t like his going away every Saturday, for we (the boss and I, the company doesn’t count for it doesn’t really exist, except for the those that reap a killing out of it, either in terms of position or the loot or both) lose a full days work, the second half of Saturday and the first of Monday. It cannot be denied that we did have a disconnection in the continuity of work. And then I had just returned from Calcutta after 5 days leave only on Wednesday last.

Just completed one-fourth of the assumed tenure of my banishment and heading towards one-third in another two months time. (Looks like an arithmetic sum and God knows I had hated arithmetic. Never found its logic. I had once failed in Arithmetic and maxed Algebra in class seven.)

25/02/2008
Just back from a heavenly Sunday at Calcutta. For once I was clear about the work at hand and attended to it as it should be attended to and missed his haircut schedule but that is one thing I can now live with, as I can now with many, many omissions.

And once the work was put away, one and a half vodkas in the afternoon, not too rushed, before a heretofore unimaginably late lunch at three in the afternoon, though the chat in the les room with the vodka wasn’t satisfactory at all.

Then the evening of poetry reading at Srijan. Confident with the last poem that I am even now very enamoured of. And that darkness that had a very high possibility of imploding into hell one day. I wonder what it is with him and darkness. Will he ever get out of it? At the back of his mind he knows it is a game. A game he can get in and out of whenever he pleases. Or so he thinks. A remnant of that vital dark one. The one who played with him and when the game got serious chickened out, shall we say? Or did she make a conscious, hard, adult, responsible choice as he had always done with women when they were hooked proper.

And the darkness and the night when she didn’t feel like sex. And the warm torrid sinful darkness so far removed from him in age as to be the next generation. And a night that tossed and turned and she wouldn’t be persuaded. And he fell off to sleep guiltily clinging on to the new darkness and then responsibly, though reluctantly, let go to wrap himself around sleep.

And then the morning; not the morning after and yet so. In my drunkenness with the rum in the evening which I insisted on and was not refused, I had, just before going off to sleep with the lights off and without my specs, wrongly adjusted to 4.10 instead of 4.40 from 4.30 that I had initially set on my phone alarm. Ten minutes of sleep on a Monday lost is irreplaceable.

And so a wrong morning. But such wrongs didn’t matter any more as there was the day to be got through and the week and another one hundred and thirteen weeks before I was eligible to beg,

“Please, please, sir. I beg you on my knees. Grant me the boon of getting back to my family. I shall do whatever you ask. Type. Photocopy. File. Carry it to your house at ten on a Saturday evening should you need to wipe your arse with it in the morning. Year after year after year I shall do the same killingly repetitive menial work and not complain. I shall never ever allow myself to show any intelligence, for only you can be intelligent, experienced, and knowledgeable and have perfect judgement, besides having all the good qualities that a man can have. For you are the Managing Director. Do we know how much you endured to get this far? We do not. We can’t even imagine. When you joined the company you slept on the roadside beneath a tree. And we got to stay in brick and mortar buildings and then had the gumption to complain that those were workers quarters, and the door to the loo had been so eaten away by termites that it had just fallen off and wasn’t worth putting up again and that we were entitled to at least B type quarters.

I am so ashamed of having behaved thus abominably. I promise I shall never ever complain. For anything. Even if my salary is delayed by six months. I can wait a year for my pay. But please, please let me get back to my family now. I know I would be unbelievably, impossibly fortunate if that were to happen. That there are so many who have offered to resign in writing and are waiting for two years now for your decision on whether their resignation is to be accepted. If they leave before their resignation is accepted they loose a lot of money from their retirement benefits.

I shall wait. I shall come again next Saturday and wait the whole day at your ante-chamber and not leave it for an instant for food or water or smoke for no one ever knows when you might have the theme to see me, especially your secretaries and peons. I shall wait.”

Poems rejected by The Statesman (Kolkata)

This morning even before I had had tea I went out to get a copy of The Statesman, as dad, the recipient of that paper in our house (I subscribe to 3 other newspapers, TOI & The Telegraph & Ananda Bajar Patrika), had instructed the boy not to deliver it till his return from his pilgrimage/holiday on 23rd Nov. The urgency was to check whether the poem that I had mailed to the paper last Sunday had been published. I was pissed off to see that it hadn't. But my daughter consoled me. She told me that now The Statesman couldn't attract any talent and possibly the person deciding on whether to accept my poem for publication was a graduate from Bangabashi College, which might be true. So here it is. I publish in this lovely instrument presented by modern technology and Google. So here it is.



Transmigration

I

Decades
Slipping between bodies in a bus, nine to five
Wiping his brow carefully lest the sweat
Drip onto other bodies
Pages turned reveal the same text, morning and evening
Petrolly dusks over dark skeletal houses across the road
Netted in tram wires, the same dirty slashes of blue or grey
Dusted with kites, as irrelevant flies, mornings too
Sunny, putrefying
Fortunate windows sometimes catching a gasp of wind.

And words.
Peanut shells of words
Arranged, re-arranged, urgently, endlessly.

Such decades

Suddenly flip over in the winds of time on the street
An expanding eternity of green, leathery, feathery
Branches languorously elongating in the sun
Spanning entire excited teenages right upto the sad doors of youth
Leaning out over the narrow strip of patched pitch
Glowing, carpet green above, mahogany underside.
Where time is measured in railway electric clocks.

Suddenly vistas expand, time expands
Beneath the Gainsborough dusks
The emptiness drones uninterrupted
Amid the going and coming of electricity
Entire evenings of a single candle on the window in a dusty room
Of a warped dusty table top and a cracked dressing table mirror
Framed in cobwebs.

Beneath the stretching branches
Leading to a distant forlorn round-about
A thick invisible swirling mass of absence roars
Sweeps you off, you take water, choke, splutter,
You try to expel the cold stone in your gullet,
To no avail

“It happens to everyone”
Your protestations that it’s so unnecessary
Chokes in your throat
You cry, choke, sink, swim
And are thrown onto a Saturday train
And later, breathe
Your feet on terra firma of your home city.


II

But your city.
Your city.
A dimension has slipped.
You pass through familiar streets
In a film.

Your home, your woman, your child
They are there
In two dimension

The mangled finger will not uncurl and touch
Visions of the inevitable darkness of Monday dawns
Slip in surreptitiously between your woman and you
And where are your ears
You miss out on the gurgling trivia of her week past
Hiding tribulations faced alone

And she is lost
The TV is no consolation.

III

Bit by bit pieces fall in place
The miracle of a late night movie
On television now permitted
Of the Sunday newspapers
After breakfast
Or a nap
Sunday mornings
From an unreal past
Are found between forgotten bills.

IV

Suburban afternoons
After a tender lunch, once unnoticed
Fade to an evening balcony
Over a home street of a past life.
Hurried packing and
The drink of forgetfulness
Jolts awake
To the arms on a cross at quarter to three
Though the trap door should have sprung
At quarter past four.

The prison van or a shared taxi
With other ghosts
Rushes over the dawning river
To another life
To the cacophony of similar birds
On the same platform
Waiting for the same train.

Copyright : Tapas Bandyopadhyaya

Man With No Home

Now I have no home. No. I am not a refugee from a third world country. I am victim of the economic system whereby I have to shift my location away from my family in order to get the dole that is given to me as salary for my services to the company, a government owned company in India.

Strangely, and I am not alone in viewing it as such, this is because I got a promotion with which came a reduction in pay. Easy to understand if you are in the service of the Government of India or a State Government. You dont get the House Rent Allowance which you used to get for living in your own house at the old location. And that is 30% of your basic pay and one-fifth of your take home pay. Some promotion ! And you can do nothing about it. Not even suggest a remedy to the powers that be because that might be viewed as misconduct !

So I live six days of the week in the town where I am posted and one day with my family at Kolkata and I am confused as to which town/city I should call my home.

I know I am fortunate in having a secure job. There are others in this economic system where persons work thousands of kilometres away from their families on six month contracts. From time to time they are stranded at home without a contract. The power of money !

Love after Love

Love After Love
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Thats a lovely one with which I have been in love ever since I saw it sometime last year.