Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 1, Number 2. November 2018. ISSN: 2581-7094
A Pavement Called Lesbos
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Bob DCosta
Everywhere there’s
autumn smelling in the air, and all over in the streets of Calcutta.
The memories of the
evening draped by the golden colours of a sunrise have tired me,
and these are the memories
I have in my mind as I declare my love for this confused city
– the queen of the
country if you are a lesbian, and if you are gay then the city is a male,
and if you are none of
the above – that is, you love the city because it’s a city where you were
nurtured, then you love Calcutta because it’s nothing but Calcutta, the city
whose contrasts vary
from the few skylines
determining to rip the skies to the pavement dwellings flattening the
metropolis, because you know, loving your city is synonymous to art
restoration. The city where even the mad man of the street quotes from Tagore’s
Gitanjali to Shakespeare’s King Lear, the city whose colossal,
old and ruined mansions
boast of art in their finest rhetoric.
A soul full of boiling
ramshackle words snuggle inside, and a sorrowful gust of fatigued summer breeze
that tell my thoughts, then there’s the aimless 21-jewels water-resistant blue
citizen watch
ready to tell my
future, and the old blind woman of the pavement of Lower Circular Road,
she treats me like her
son whom she had lost in the Naxalite reign of terror in the early roaring
seventies.
This stone-faced cop,
he questions an unlicensed whore outside Lighthouse cinema hall
and as I sit on the
roadside boulder next to the narrow winding lane where a play of faint light
from the mouth of the
lane and some glow from the last hut inside cohabit,
and these faint
unconscious patches of glow mixed with the darkness squatting forever within
churns my thoughts. And
as the dull brilliance lures me over the uneven kuchcha pathway,
the sudden scream of a
woman reaches my ears, and I aimlessly walk and peep through the small niche of
a window of the shack strewn with wretchedness and there find a woman throwing
her legs up
and kicking in mid-air,
she is in constant fight against the male power dominating over her.
When I resume my seat
on the boulder, a boy of around eighteen has cupped his hand to the tap
and he cools his throat
with its sweet water. As he stands up, satisfaction spreads its soft comfort
on his face, and soon
after he turns towards the rickshaw, and stepping inside the wooden handle
of a frame, lifts his
vehicle and resumes pulling it, the small bell tied around his finger
striking the wooden
handle with a mechanical ting-tung-tak, ting-tung-tak.
Somehow the picture of
an old lady appears from the bag of memories, her head covered with white hair
with a few streaks of blackness peeping from the straight receding white.
She has lain her head
on a footstool, it is a one-inch high footstool, and she folds a piece of cloth
and places it on the
footstool, this acts as a cushion. She lowers herself on the mat spread on the
floor of the open verandah and gently rests her head on the improvised pillow.
This open verandah of
her one-room hovel becomes her open bedroom, and it is vulnerable to rodents
that scurry up and down the drain just below her bedroom. She had spent many an
evening
rocking a little child
in her lap, and at the child’s insistence repeated the song over and over
again,
but she always wore her
smile, never did she show irritation, and the song Ten Children of Haradhon
took the little child to the forest of the song and the river bank where each
of the children played about, and at the end of every stanza, one child would
either die or get eaten up by a beast or fish till at the end the last child
was left lonely, and he began to shed copious tears till his intense loneliness
and immeasurable sorrow
took him deep into the woods and from where he never returned.
Why did he go away, why
did everyone leave him, why was he alone. All these thoughts plagued this
person as a child and still does.
Such was the condition
when Ghungroo arrived in Calcutta and this condition continued even after she
became a Prostitute of the Pavement but she didn’t know that I was somewhere
around her.