by Joy Goswami
These poems have been published for the first time in this book. They came like a storm. Those entranced days racing along my waking-dreams, it was all over as if in a blink of the mind.
Fermat’s Last Theorem is a very famous, extremely complex theorem in the world of mathematics. After three hundred years it was proved by Andrew Wiles from Princeton University. During this period of work, for seven years he kept himself far away from his friends. And finally presented a proof of one hundred and seventy-two pages. What went through his mind at the moment he first realized that he had just cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem? While attempting to answer this question, he became speechless before the TV cameras and wept. The cameras moved away from his face. A little later, he composed himself and was able to say just this: ‘It is an unbelievable beauty!’
I had the chance to see a video in which Andrew walked viewers through the complex paths of his proof, and in a slow measured way, expounded and elaborated on it. The level and extent of it was beyond my comprehension. But I could see, in a shy manner, haltingly, searching for words, every time he reached the next desired stage in the logical progression of the proof, there played on his face the light of a divine joy.
Watching him I recalled the time I had listened to Ustad Amjad Ali Khan at Coffee Corner. When he moved from one note to the next, that same kind of joyous light shone from his face too. I want to salute that joy. That’s why I dedicate this small book of poems to Professor Andrew Wiles and to Ustad Amjad Ali Khan.
The paths of profound mathematics, music and painting are sometimes, perhaps, impenetrable. But on the other side of that impenetrability awaits Beauty herself. An unbelievable beauty. And we are gazing from this side of a vast window. If only we could get a glimpse of it even once in our lifetime.
from
Du Dondo Phowara Matro (2011)
No More Than a Spurt of Time
The things you’ve heard, my dear
The kinds of things you’ve heard, my dear, these last few years, as if next to that head of his
The sun hasn’t stopped sinking … no wonder a sort of scarlet light burns
The kinds of light you’ve heard, my dear, roaming at the heels of the public!
Climbing on a high stool, your weight on the soles of your feet, raising your head you saw
The sun had gone to take a break in the marsh just behind the wall
You covered the marshland with a giant sheet for the day
Fountain
I will, certainly, certainly give you a kind of peace, but tell me, once you have that peace
Where will you put it?
Kicking aside the water with a splash you climbed the stairs
Your churidar wet to the knees
Tell me, how have you looked? You have looked among people?
That face without eyes, that’s me, I’m a kind of audience, then
You won’t have me I won’t have you we’ll only come this close
If we sit on these paved stairs—past this auditorium that fountain
In the horizon before it, we shall be no more than a spurt of time…
Where shall I put my fountain? Is there place in your womb?
Guard
As soon as the stove is set down in the courtyard the smoke rushes out to the field
I’ve forgotten the humble family, the kitchen set up in the veranda
I’ve forgotten the eating of puffed rice and green chilli from a little basket by five people
I’ve forgotten I’ve forgotten I’ve forgotten
Four youths are learning from one female companion the paramount lesson
When, in what situation, a bite on the tongue will be enough to make her stop from coming
On the verge of coming she’ll return that instant, then how to hold on, how,
How much longer is it possible, those four youths are learning
On a mat they have laid on the floor in a mud-house, how well they’re learning
What they’re learning is clear from the extremely enthusiastic extremely breathless little sounds
Reaching the fifth—me sitting in the veranda outside alone mosquito-bitten
Guarding the three bicycles of those four…
Closed window
I lay my hand on the body of the closed window. On the body of the white wall.
Holes appear in those two places.
In one of them, telescope still glued
To his eye, Galileo gazes at the sky. Indifferent
To the orders of the church. In the other,
Boris Pasternak sits with his books at the table.
In between those two cavities a wide-open area
Tiananmen.
Students’ dead bodies lie scattered around.
Some are still twitching.
A tank has just run over them.
Ancient
All earth so ancient. So cold! I’m afraid
To lie down. It was Baba I came with. Baba’s
So cold, I’m afraid to touch him. Lips twisted to the left
Ma’s face, hard. So hard, I’m afraid
To smear ghee on it. Keoratola? Or Halishohor?
The Ganga is in both places. Baba-Ma’s rooms
Are separate.
All the rooms so ancient.
I used to ramble around with Ma. Still rambling around, today I discover:
There’s nothing in the room, just a moon with eyes gouged out and
Heaps of wood burnt to ash.
Will it?
Will the old house come at high noon, its rafters broken?
If called, will it stand before me, the old house with the banyan tree
In its hands on its feet its shoulders its back?
Are countless prickly poppies on guard, their yellow flowers crawling with caterpillars?
Will anyone light a fire to burn the caterpillars?
Will long half-burnt snakes slither sinuously down
From the shiuli tree?
Will you and Raghu come out of the house?
Will it show itself again, the cracked floor, as soon as it’s called?
And in the dust on the floor
The mark of your violent lovemaking? Will it show?
From the water
Don’t imagine I’ve forgotten you were a fish when I last saw you.
Not a backward glance at your children. Dropping shoals of eggs
You floated away. Other fish gobbled them up—I was one
Of the lucky few who survived.
At long last I’ve risen from water to land. Behind me
The sea came to an end today . . .
That impenetrable forest ahead bids me welcome.
Water
I didn’t tell Ma. Not even her. Who knows why!
Now on the lookout for so many things
I see it floating in the water—that ‘not-telling’.
Ma’s very close by, just below the water.
From the surface of the water you can clearly see
There’s melted mud all over Ma’s body.
Her skull no longer holds a brain—tiny creepers sway inside it…
‘Not-telling’ tells me it’s no good telling her now!
Jealousy fest
You snatched away my plate this morning! What’s that, next
To the curry? It’s a human eye.
And that, between the potatoes and lady-fingers? Fried babyfingers.
Breast-meat in the bowl next to it.
Now eat if you can. Or else, get mad at the thief
And go lie down in the earth at the bottom of the grave.
Insomnia
Jamuna and all say it’s a creeper. Y’all say it’s a snake.
Lying on the roof you see: circular marks like gold coins
On its body—the snake is advancing—are snakes this long?
Curving in and out through the gaps between a handful of stars, the snake
Is advancing…
Just crossed Venus, n
ow it’s dropping
Towards the moon … Snagged by its tail
A nameless galaxy looks like it’s about to fall headlong
Into our solar system…
You get up in a flurry saying ‘Now what, what now’
Lose your footing and slip from the roof
Down down down
Into your bed…
Outside your window, as always, the wee hours of the night.
Tick-mark
Whenever I find it convenient, I’ll let them know—I’ve understood it all.
I never said anything verbally—that’s why on walls, in schoolrooms,
On post offices and hospital buildings, in stations
I’ll leave a tick-mark in chalk.
Heard my list of objects at rest? I’ll leave a mark on restless objects too—
On moving trains, on long-distance buses running from village to village
At airports
On that ready-to-take-off beginning-to-race-down-the-runway
Boeing 747
I’ve just put a tick-mark. They’ll spread this bit of news in different directions—
Today I know it all today I’ve understood it all
Nothing is beyond my comprehension anymore, just this minute I reached out of the window
Marked a cross on the moon, Mercury Venus Uranus Pluto all of them marked
The further they advance into space taking this solar system with them
The more it’ll be publicized—I’ve understood it all I totally know it all.
Aduri
Bukun and Kaberi buried Aduri in the Bengal Lamp field
I stayed at home.
At night I see Aduri chasing the ball of wool on the floor
Like she used to, in the dark.
Oh, but this isn’t a ball! She’s rolling around on the floor with the sun.
A long comet-like tail keeps emerging
From it…
Holding the fiery ball in her mouth
Adu runs off somewhere…
I’m standing in an endless sky looking for her
On all sides hundreds of stars float away
Aduri, again
Adu was our house cat
She loved eating. Puffed-rice, sweets, fried potatoes—she’d eat everything
Sitting on the writing table she’d observe what I was writing
From time to time she’d swat the pen in my hand with her paw
Giving her a pen to play with on the floor
I’d return to my writing
Aduri runs through the sky like a cheetah—can you tell what’s in her mouth?
Not a pen, a bone.
A piece of bone from a flattened nebula
Naturally she won’t find
Kaberi’s monotonous fish-and-rice tasty anymore!
So many glowing astronomical treats
Are served up for Aduri in tonight’s sky!
Quarrels
My brother quarrels. That’s why I hardly go home.
It’s not like I’m loaded with gold! Neither is my brother.
As we accuse each other endlessly, night falls
The moon descends into the coconut tree—
The moon takes us to task: You’re both too old for this.
You both have high blood pressure.
Go, go to bed.
We lift our mosquito nets and get in.
The night-guard’s whistle keeps the night-watch going.
In a blue-funk-brown-study
They sit out the night, our quibbling quarrels
Trickster
Trickster informed me, ‘I’m quitting my job and going home.’
‘How will I manage?’
‘Try my elder brother.’
His elder brother is Mister Confidence-Trickster. Works at Truth’s place.
I went over. Visitors in every room. Mister Confidence-Trickster sat me down
In a corner. Truth kept saying ‘hmm’ and ‘uh-huh’
To everyone. Kept saying ‘And then what happened?’
Everyone talking at the same time. Just then Mrs Deceit
Entered with a heap of files, to get them signed.
Mister Confidence-Trickster said—‘You see how it is. I have to do all Her work
Myself. Won’t find time to do yours.’
I came back. Got news from home—
Trickster never went back to his village. No signs
Of him anymore.
I was in the train. I saw Trickster
Sleeping in the fields in the form of sunshine
When night fell I spotted him from the train window
Soaking in the rain in the form of an empty bench
At a nameless station
How could I call him, it was such a tiny station, the train didn’t stop.
The master speaks
You’re bound to be mentioned in many of my stories
The bucket you filled, the plate you washed with your own hands,
Your putting clothes out to dry every day, your bringing them in,
Your shopping, your requests for things essential and unnecessary
All of it
Will be there in bits and pieces—
What won’t be there? What?
Your sucking out all my poison, there’ll be no mention
Of that…
Two pages
The sky was folded in two. As soon as it was unfolded
Two beams from dawn’s eyes pierced evening’s forehead.
Now, God with his own loving hands
Is tenderly arranging the day’s funeral pyre
He just left.
When the half-moon came and stood on the horizon
To have a last look, he saw in the east and the west
Two pages glittering with death’s poem!
Vow
I, Crow, called you Koel in adulation.
Knowing you’d leave your eggs in my empty nest
I’d abandon it and wander here and there.
Every day I’d return and see, no, you haven’t come.
Yet how strange, the moon hasn’t cut short his visits
To my nest! Every morning the sun drops in.
If I run out of you, what shall I live for, thirst?
This heartbreaking thirst, may it never lessen.
With no other wish but this, here I am
Tying a stone to a branch of the banyan tree.
Garden of illusion
Tied around Baba’s neck, a harmonium.
Two men on either side with tom-toms.
Behind him, their hands raised, devotees lost in trance.
A procession of song is going through Pagla Goswami’s neighbourhood.
Eighty years later I take a trip down those roads.
Rush hour’s not picked up yet.
In the prayer-room Krishna-Radhika sit sweetly smiling.
Soundlessly, this old place
Has recognized me: You’re Madhu Goshai’s eldest son?
Enormous pillars. What a high roof.
All over the walls, cracks have struck their paws.
Pillars embraced by vines.
Eighty-two years ago, leaning against these pillars,
Harmonium in hand, he spent whole nights awake
With his band of kirtan-singers, my song-crazy dad.
Those days, a mango-grove bordered the temple. Thick as a jungle.
Today, that jungle comes and stands before me.
At night a storm rises in the mango-grove.
I see between the trees Baba’s choristers
Sleeping in the rain, on their backs, on their sides.
Leafy branches are breaking down, falling on their heads, their bodies. But
Not one of them gets up.
Smashed eggs lie scattered everywhere, dead birds and
Burst-open mangoes.
Baba simply tucks in his dhuti
And, walking through the gaps in the trees
Finds, this minu
te, his broken harmonium
Aduri, once again
She’d sleep at my feet. She’d invariably come home late.
I’d stand in the veranda and call:
‘Come, Adu, bedtime!’
Sure enough, she’d come.
From my sleep I glance at the window:
Adu’s walking on the neighbouring wall—
I call her—she doesn’t recognize me
From her body innumerable fire-sparks fly
Innumerable fire-sparks
Thousands, ten thousands…
Everything covered by that storm
Relationships
Relationships don’t last. Gradually they drown.
When the water recedes, what remains is silt. Grass rises in it.
Leaves, creepers, weeds are born.
A stray dog brings a dead crow from who knows where
Hides it in a jungle of weeds.
Another dog comes chasing after him—
Snatches it from his jaws.
That’s what has happened between us—
What choice do we have but to accept it!
House
I hope the tree’s still there? The tree’s still there, right?
Is the veranda open like before? It hasn’t been enclosed by a grille, I hope?
Is the well still there in the next compound? The pulley to draw water?
Does the half-filled bucket come up
Swinging from side to side?
Does Bandi’s ma still sweep the courtyard? Does Bandiram pick tender coconuts?
Does a gang of little grey babblers fly away to sit on the roof of the cowshed?
The cows aren’t there, but the cowshed’s there, right? Next to the shiuli tree
The cowshed? It’s still there, right? The two containers for fodder?
Where the cows would lower their faces and feed once the ropes were loosened?
