Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Poems

Self-advertisement (one)

I don’t want to be a paperback

Thrown away after you’ve read it,

Pages coming loose from their binding.

I don’t want to be an expensive hardback

Left to the care of soft dust and silverfish on a high shelf.

I don’t want to be either of these.

I want you to remember me like a rhyme you learnt in childhood

Or shouted aloud like a lawless handbill

I want you to accept me naturally

As you’ve learnt to accept grief.

Warning

On the other side of the Jirat bridge

The newly planted kadam trees, lacking intelligence

Grow by leaps and bounds.

Pruning’s going on in the sky

I saw a kite’s two wings on the street today.

Someone’s scrawling across the city

That the sun goes round the earth.

On the underground platform I wait for someone

In cold expectation.

Sounds, light: a travelling coffin

Rushes towards me.

Since everyone says that the city

Is altering its appearance at breakneck speed,

Listen, then.

Fasten your seat-belts tightly,

Put out your cigarettes.

What kind of city is this

What kind of city is this

That forgets its sparrows

What kind of city is this

That forgets its warriors, whores and poets

What kind of city is this

Where multi-storeyed crematoriums rise into the sky

What kind of city is this

Where dogs and trams are about to be banned

What kind of city is this

Where trees shut their eyes in fear

What kind of city is this

Where one can’t hear drumbeats any more

What kind of city is this

Where fake eunuchs dance in the newspapers everyday

What kind of city is this

Where one, licking his fingers to count banknotes, turns out to have no tongue

What kind of city is this

Where plastic bags can vote

What kind of city is this

Where writers burn out like cigarettes

What kind of city is this

Where students blind from birth are battered to death on blackboards

This city is dead

My last wish for it – a grenade.

Balloons

A man wearing blue safety-glasses is welding

At this, streaks of lightning decided to flash

A cat was startled out of sleep

A man pushes a huge block of ice

In the market, night-blind flies sit on the wires

From which light-bulbs hang. Dead fish don’t fear the cold.

A man is pulling along a garbage van

Full of flowers, bones, peelings, plastic bags, empty liquor bottles

The whole world is turning into a rubbish dump.

Those whose bombs blew a boy’s hands off

Have sent him two artificial ones

Those who lost their heads weren’t so lucky.

All that happens doesn’t find mention in literature

The whole of literature has taken possession of a void

In which, filled with sighs,

A few balloons try to float.

Last Wish

When I die

The house that I’ve built of words

Will collapse in tears

Not surprising

The mirror in the house will wipe me away

The walls won’t have my pictures on them

I never liked walls

The sky will be my wall then

And the birds will write my name on it

With chimney-smoke

Or the sky will be my writing-desk

The moon my cold paper-weight

And stars will be pricked into my dark velvet pin-cushion 

I won’t remember myself and feel sad

My hand doesn’t tremble as I write this

But when I first held your hand

My hand trembled

Part passion, part shyness

My beautiful wife, my beloved

My memories will surround you

You needn’t cling on to them

Build a life for yourself

My memory will be your comrade

If you love someone

Give them these memories

Make him your comrade

But I’m leaving it all to you

I believe you won’t make a mistake

When you teach my son his letters

For the first time, teach him

To love people, sunlight, stars

He’ll be able to solve difficult problems

He’ll understand the algebra of revolution

Better than me

He’ll teach me to walk in a rally

On stony ground or on grass

Tell him about my faults

Let me not scold me

My dying isn’t such a great matter

I knew I wouldn’t live long

But my belief never wavered

Overcoming every death

Denying all darkness

Long live the revolution

May the revolution live forever

Something’s burning

Something’s burning

In a corner, untimely, under the mattress, in the crematorium,

Something’s definitely burning

I can smell the smoke

Someone’s lit a cheap tobacco twist

Someone’s squatting over a clay stove, blowing on the coals

Someone’s put a shrivelled baby

Dead of enteritis, on a funeral pyre

Flaming birds tumble from the sky

Somewhere, a gas cylinder has exploded

There’s a fire in a coalmine, in a fireworks factory

Something is burning

All four corners have caught fire

The burning mosquito net will descend on you as you sleep

Something’s burning

The stars burn, the spacecraft with its crew is on fire

Entrails, gut are afire with hunger

The youth’s afire with love

The body of desire burns, chaff, cotton soaked in machine oil

Something’s definitely burning

You’re hit by a blast of heat

Buildings, moral values, huge portrait hanging somewhere

Promises, television, rare books

Something’s burning

I’m rummaging through everything to find

What’s burning, where

What’s causing the blisters on my hands

Something’s burning, something’s caught fire

Burning quietly, burning in silence

But if a storm comes it’ll suddenly burst into flame

I’m telling you, something’s burning

Fire engine, umbilical cavity, sun

Something’s burning

In front of everyone, right before your eyes,

Amidst all the people

Homeland!

Tram

I too am dying out from Calcutta, tram.

Written off because I’m too slow, obstinate, unprofitable:

Dark when untouched by electricity,

I too become night-blind, stupid:

Like a beached dolphin, nose down, motionless.

No one will put up with these old crocks any more;

Now it’s all fast food, debentures, shares, smart money.

Better for both of us to get out of it all,

Isn’t that so, tram?

No one will take you on the second Hooghly Bridge, tram.

No one will take you to Salt Lake, to the Taj Bengal,

To the marshes of Greater Calcutta, the reckless curves of the Bypass.

Does Madonna’s wild tempo ever

Make its way into a sonorous alap or jod?

Many years from now, indeed,

Your lights slipping away at night on the Maidan

While here and there, strung around temple or church,

Bells ring out a message;

Each ticket like a page of poetry,

The conductor-librarian,

The ancient driver – 

 all this will become antique Egypt,

The vanquished will be lost in the depths.

Yet, tram, with you

                        the protest march held step;

And sitting in your second class carriage

                        the poet of rallies

Sang untunefully,

                        songs of revolt and freedom.

With your three eyes and rain-soaked lights you were

                        the unearthly transport of lovers.

I too am being written off in Calcutta, tram.

I too from networks overhead

                        visible or invisible, draw no dreams.

Tram, I too am being taken off

                        because I’m too slow, awkward, unprofitable.

In the end, tram, the people of Calcutta

Will lack the word ‘outline’;

Nothing but set hymns; no one

                        will so much as sing a song of rejection.

Like a patient refused entry at hospital after hospital,

Like an injured boxer or football player,

In hurt pride, insult, neglect,

                        scrapped by the profit principle,

We too are dying out from Calcutta, tram. 

--------------------------------Translated by Supriya Chaudhuri