Review: Ship of Theseus

In 2000, Eidos Interactive released John Romero’s Diakatana. As First Person Shooter games go, Daikatana was supposed to be the absolute pinnacle. One of the early commercials infamously read, ‘John Romero’s about to make you his bitch’ followed by ‘Suck it down.’ When the game finally released, players and critics minced it into a fine paste. Today Daikatana is a cautionary tale of hubris.

Yesterday I travelled to the other end of Delhi to be Anand Gandhi’s willing bitch. After all, Dibakar Banerjee, Amir Khan and Anurag Kashyap had already sucked him down before me and I usually trust their taste. Moreover short films are making a commercial comeback in India and from the celebrity blurbs all over the internet (yes, I’ll call them blurbs and not bytes), I expected Ship of Theseus to be the next Teen Kanya. It isn’t.  Not that it doesn’t have its moments, nor that it’s in any way inferior to Bombay Talkies, the last ‘serious’ Mumbai production, but (a large, ripe luscious BUT) it’s definitely not the film which according to Kashyap’s own acknowledgement has made him ashamed of himself.

Let’s begin with the most important question: how cerebral/ pretentious is Ship? Well, the first epithet could be applied to the first short and the second epithet to the second. The third short which ties the narrative together is a sack with a decaying bottom. Let’s analyze the three plot strands one by one:

1. A girl takes up photography after losing sight to cornea infection.  This is the strongest story of the three. Film-maker Alda-el-Kashef is perfect as Aliya Kamal, the blind photographer who won’t accept condescension from her partner and is severely critical of her own work.  In the later part of the short when she regains sight and becomes more appreciative of her art, or when she wonders whether the transition from sightlessness to sight is worth it and binds her eyes with her hair band is cinematic genius. One particular scene stands out. After the successful cornea transplantation, a mirror is carried across a hall to Aliya’s hospital room. She looks into it and smiles. Her boyfriend clicks photos of her looking at the mirror. Her mother and sister, on the other end of a video conference call smile at her being photographed while she’s looking at the mirror. Poetry, sheer poetry!

 2. A monk (Neeraj Kabi) fighting for the rights of lab animals is diagnosed with liver cirrhosis and wonders whether to die an idealist or to undergo liver transplantation and live on drugs that have been tested on lab animals. This is probably the best shot of the three shorts. DOP Pankaj Kumar captures the monk’s walk along railway tracks, under windmills, and between large metal pipes and when the monk finally reaches a decision, there is no need for words. Much of the film is silent and this is probably why the brief interludes of spiritual discourse are so jarring. The priest gazes out of the window of a large monolithic building, a red panopticon and debates with his protégé, a young lawyer, on life, impulse and decisions. The philosophy is unoriginal and uninspired.  Sample this: ‘Everything we do has a consequence on every atom in the universe. Every action, even inaction leaves a karmic record’. Naah, didn’t work for me.

   

3. A number of sub-plots actually. However, the central story is this: a stock broker (Navin Parnami) accused by his grandmother of being insensitive chances upon a daily wage labourer who has been robbed of his kidney and travels to Stockholm to meet with the receiver. As mentioned earlier, this is where Gandhi fails and fails on multiple fronts. The running time is too long (painful, as a friend remarked), the ending too cheesy and the resolution formulaic. It is revealed that the stock broker, the monk (now in plain clothes, having probably surrendered his monastic vows) and the photographer have all received organ donations from the same person, the metaphorical Ship of Theseus. A couple of years ago, Hany Babu summed up a similar paradox in a more horrific manner. It was a class on the resolution of a sentence to morphemes and Mr Babu’s argument was this: ‘Suppose you cut a man’s finger, does he still remain a man? Proceed further and hack off his hand. Is he still a man? Go one step further and… forget it, it’s too gross an example’. Gandhi leaves the film at a similar junction. To his credit, the film doesn’t turn into a tank of glycerine as the Will Smith starrer Seven Pounds.

One of the defects of the film is the use of subtitles, especially in the last short. Now when it is known that you are marketing a film for an urban audience, where is the need to translate Swedish dialogues to English and let a character re-translate it to Hindi? In fact, why does the organ receiver have to be Swedish at all? Make him an American or an Indian industrialist or something. Three years ago Q showed us the way with the highly energetic Gandu. I won’t comment on the film but he made subtitles a work of art.

Canon EOS 1D Mark IV is the real winner. Whether it is the close up of a fly preening its legs or of cloud formations in Sweden, the camera always entertains. Then there are the moments. The sightless photographer reminisces over a childhood memory of a cart pulled by swans which, she is convinced, is a true memory. However, when she gains sight, she realizes that this scene, so vivid in her memory is actually an illustration in a childrens’ book. It is fitting that the short ends with the lens cover of her camera, her instrument of sight, falling into a mountain stream.  Nature and chance won’t allow her sightlessness ever again.

Gandhi has his realism in place. Whether it is the courtroom scenes or the daily life of the monk, they are much better treated than in mainstream Indian cinema. The cuts from one short to another are splendid. The second short begins with a person rising from bed. It’s not yet dawn, there is a draught from the open window and the naked torso of a man in a lungi rises from bed. It’s a long establishing shot but I didn’t know if the person was the photographer’s boyfriend or a new character until the next shot showed the monk walking out on his begging rounds. Similarly, the second film ends with the monk’s ignorance of the existence of a soul and the scene cuts to lush green grass waving in the breeze. The next short begins in a hospital ward with a  A Band of Boys song playing in the background.

Coming back to the beginning. Like Diakatana, Ship of Theseus comes after three years in production. Like Diakatana, it uses a marketing strategy so in your face that it makes you gag. Unlike Daikatana, Ship of Theseus will recover its budget and more. Anand Gandhi will make a far better movie. And when it is released, I’ll be his willing bitch again, whether he asks me to or not.

A review of 'Tattooed with taboos' (Shreema Ningombam, Choba Phuritshabam, Soibam Haripriya),

(Published in Seven Sister's Post, February 12, 2012.)

Tattooed with taboos is an anthology of seventy seven poems by three women poets that tries to understand what it means to be a young Manipuri woman. Like most of the recent literature from India’s north-east, the answer is struggle. The poems are divided into three categories- ‘Tattooed with Taboos’, ‘Angst for Homeland’ and ‘Love and Longingness’ (sic). The first set deals with the woman question- the problem of female sexuality and the possibility of and need for emancipation. However, it is a very political and essentially Manipuri question. The second set moves slightly away from this theme to the wider political condition in a Manipur torn between tradition and change. Again, this is not an un-gendered condition as the problem of politics is strongly embedded in the femininity of the women poets. The third set is a collection of ‘love poems’. However, the love and longing is only sometimes about romantic or sexual love. Mostly, the tone is severely sarcastic and the style one of parody.

However, the book is an example of how a great deal of talent is lost for the want of a good editor. Atrocious grammatical errors and a generous amount of cliché make some of the better poems almost unreadable. For a very long time, Indian English Literature, especially the literature produced from non-metropolitan areas has been criticised of exhibiting the ruggedness of translation. Sadly, many of the poems in this collection suffer that drawback. The translation of thought from the languages of Manipur to English is not very smooth and betrays the process. Some of the phrases are out of place and in a few places, the idiom seems to be borrowed directly from the mother language. Confusion of tenses is another hindrance to smooth reading.

The third poem in the first set, Soibam’s ‘I Died a Little’ deals with the three stages of a woman’s life- puberty, loss of virginity and marriage. It is through these rites of passage that the persona is introduced to the patriarchal codes set for women and her individuality dies a little while passing through the three steps. A few common images run through the poems. One is the Swiftian technique of using the image of clothes as an extended metaphor. In Soibam’s ‘Of Clothes and Robes’, a sash represents individualism and femininity and the persona’s act of replacing it with another sash under the influence of other voices that speak of ‘freedom’ and ‘culture’ represents the polarised political situation of Manipur. The sexual politics of women’s clothing, especially the traditional phanek surfaces heavily in the poems of Shreema Ningombam. In ‘Unburdening Dead Spirits’, ‘To the Ema Lairembi’ etc, the ‘uncleanliness’ and inauspiciousness of the phanek are celebrated. Shreema’s poems are red-eyed and restless. The female personas are charged with the energy of protest and are unwilling to adjust within patriarchal norms. In the poem ‘One Last Time’, a phrase of which forms the title of the anthology, the woman seeks emancipation through the pursuit of prohibited pleasures and the reversal of societal codes. However, the frenzy is interspersed with absolutely delicate gems like ‘In Red’ where the surrealism shifts from gloom to mellowness and the magical concluding line,

No, you must go before the night turns red.

is filled with yearning. Chaoba Phuritshabam’s poems are less energetic and unlike Shreema’s personas, the voices here are more universal. The language of the poems, however, is simple and unassuming. It is this property of the poems that gives a sharp edge to the meaning. Sample the business-like tone adopted in the poem ‘Fruits of Your Taste’ where varieties of female bodies are put on display for the male gaze:

Welcome to the market of fruits
Some are like your favourite apple
Some looks (sic) like your juicy orange…

Chaoba’s ‘Questions on her’ is placed strategically at the end of the ‘Tattooed with Taboos’ section. In its analogy between the prostitution of a woman and the prostitution of the Loktak lake, it anticipates the next section, ‘Angst for Homeland.’ This section deals basically with the identity crisis of the average Manipuri women. ‘Between two flags’ depicts the problem of a state caught between its monarchical past and its current status as a state of the Indian Union. ‘Patriot of My Land’ shows how power corrupts the self-proclaimed liberator. For Shreema, home and mother are indistinguishable from homeland and the angst arises from the feeling of strangeness on revisiting the primeval stage after a period of experience. The phanek ‘stained with primeval blood’ returns to remind us that the angst is again, very gendered and personalized. The conflict between the new and the memory of the old is summarised in the beginning stanza of ‘Broken’

I am home and they are still here
The streets still scarred
These hills still in reverie
Which one is more sore?
The broken strings of your guitar
Or the broken notes of their Pena

The analogy between the guitar and the Pena resonates with the guitar/balalaika pair in The Scorpions’ ‘Wings of Change’ though in an exactly opposite context. The home gives the persona everything except, like the tragic Mughal prince,

… a tiny corner
To rest at long last
Broken bones of our hearts.

Soibam’s poems in this section are vitriolic attacks on various aspects of the Indian democracy, especially ‘India whining’ as opposed to ‘India shining.’ In ‘Another Polish for My Nails’, my favourite poem from this set, an ordinary voter pines after the politician like a beloved waiting for her lover to fulfil his ‘promises.’ The electoral ink is satirized as a lover’s gift of nail polish for his beloved. The poem concludes in a mock-pining note

Yet I believed
Like a love struck luckless lover
I wish I have (sic) chosen
Another polish for my nails.

The final section, ‘Love and Longingness (sic)’ is the weakest link in the anthology. The metaphors are stale and the language is stiff and prosaic. Shreema’s ‘Becoming of You in Me’ is heavy on metaphysical conceit but the selection of words and syntactic errors make the poem almost unbearable. Only Soibam delivers in this set. In her pleasantly caustic love-letter-like ‘To the Researcher,’ the relationship between the government survey analyst and a villager is parodied as a romantic relationship. The language shifts between a lover’s rebuke and a song of yearning.

Should he come? No one gives a damn. (A review of 'Samiran Baruah ahi ase'

There are many ways to begin this review. One might say that it takes great courage and vision to translate a popular short story into cinema. Or, one might say that it takes great courage to make a good regional movie. One might even say that it takes more courage to make a bad movie and think of giving it a theatrical release. There are so many things wrong with Prodyut Kr Deka’s Samiran Baruah ahi ase that it is heart-breaking to decide where to begin. In the Assamese film industry, once in a while comes an Assamese film which comes once in a while. The industry is as dead as Tyrannosaurus Rex and public expectations are as high as the Nilachal. That is why it makes sense if the films that do get released are at least moderately watchable. Mon Jai, for instance was no cinematic gem nor was it contemporary but the depressing tale of four unemployed youths who achieve no redemption gave us much hope. The casting was spot on and the acting was pretty standard. The sad thing about Samiran is that it has an engaging story and a respected cast. The problem is with the manner in which the story is told and the handling of the actors. The keystone plot is of a pair of reporters who must report a fake interview with the eponymous Samiran Baruah (Tapan Das), head of an unnamed liberation army (read ULFA). And then, there are the subplots: Samiran’s return to Guwahati from ‘across the border, the private life of a police officer who has sworn to catch the renegade and a flashback of Samiran’s childhood. The different stories are divided into Tarantinoesque ‘stories’ which completely lack the Tarantino ingenuity and rather, cause a severe confusion of chronology.

It feels terribly unpatriotic and hard-hearted to say this but trust me, with this film, Mr Deka walks into Ed Wood territory- a genre of cinema that is equal parts unintentionally funny and baffling. Characters are often introduced by name and then left out for the entirety of the film. The ‘stories’ are suddenly and inexplicably ended once they begin to engage. Some of the dialogue is mouthed but not voiced. The implications of these unheard words are never revealed nor do they build up suspense of any kind. It is like the silent whisper towards the ending of Lost in Translation but a silent whisper you want to rinse in the Bharalu River, chop into fine bits, put them in a bag with large stones, sink it somewhere and then have your memory erased.

But, let me resume. Like every other film, there is something redeeming in Samiran. It is the realisation that beneath his skin, Prodyut Kr Deka has the soul of a little frustrated adolescent. Ample screen time is given to a swimsuit scene, a bathtub scene, one item song and the most unbearable lovemaking scene in recent cinema- all in a one and a quarter hour film that pretends to deal with questions like statehood, liberty and the need for a vengeful messiah. These techniques belong to another film-maker much loved for the infamous practice of inserting item songs after funerals- Kanti Shah. And like in Kanti Shah, irony, if there is any, is lost to everyone. The audience reaction to Samiran was similar to the reaction to any Kanti Shah film. They laughed at all the ‘wrong’ places and applauded the shameless clichés and awful dialogues. Unfortunately, when it seemed that this particular film would top the so-bad-that-its-good hall of shame, the film turned plain boring. The cinematography, in one word, is pathetic especially the POV shots which are hazy. The censors are inconsistent. In one scene, a burning cigarette is pixelated but in a scene towards the close of the film, one of the actors puffs away gloriously. The subtitles are equally funny. In one scene where the ageing parents of the absconding renegade are musing upon there lost son, an one-liner by the old father is translated as follows:
‘How long you gonna live like this?’
That sounds more Harlem than Hajo.

However, the undisputed champion is the editing. Many times in the movie, it becomes evident that the director started out with the idea of creating an epic but finally decided to make a short film. For lack of footage, the same scene is repeated, sometimes more than once. Silent montages appear unheralded and one hopelessly useless scene of a camera panning over the Guwahati cityscape begins after Samiran’s monologue and continues for a full painful minute. Then there are the pop culture references. Framed photographs of Bhupen Hazarika and Bishnu Prasad Rabha hang from the walls of a room in which a group of young drunks sing Beatles’ songs and yearn for expensive liquor, women and pornography and believe that the return of Samiran Baruah will herald an era of hedonism and debauchery.

The real questions are in the margin- Is it feasible for a romantic nihilistic renegade to lead a violent popular movement? Does the common man really want such a hero? However, the questions are never asked nor even implied. A film with the name of the protagonist in the title suggests a Beckettian character who never turns up. Instead, we have Tapan Das, stubbled owner of a stoned voice walking lost on the Ganeshguri flyover and all the effect is lost.
The film does ask one question though: should Samiran Baruah come or not and ends with the suggestion, ‘Bhabi sauk’ (think about it). On exiting the auditorium, I asked a friend what the hell was the film about. ‘Bhabi sauk’, she said.

(Samiran Baruah Ahi Ase releases in March.)

An Obituary (9 March 2011)

My uncle, Abdul Baten died this morning. He was about fifty. A month ago, he had suddenly taken ill and was diagnosed with a weak heart. For a person who hadn’t suffered from any major disease before, this was a shock. He found it difficult to undergo the strict medication and the stricter daily routine. He was a farmer and had worked on his land for almost four decades. Leaving the work for a premature retirement was incomprehensible to him. So, he largely neglected the doctor’s advice and continued working on his farm and on his new dream- a house. He had built one earlier and had started on a bigger one a couple of months ago. Yesterday morning he had stood waist deep in water for a long time fishing. Then he had slit bamboo spears for his garden fence. In the evening, he came down with a cold and had a little difficulty in breathing. The problems intensified this morning and he passed away at around seven.

My uncle’s life was not extra-ordinary but is still a life worth writing about. He was our grandparents’ fifth child after my two pehis (paternal aunts), abba and Kalam uncle. By the time he was ready for farming, the family had achieved some prosperity, so he didn't have to work on other people’s land or shovel earth for the embankment as his brothers before him. He was the first among his brothers to marry and the family of seven brothers and one sister (my older aunts had married and moved out) lived under the ladle of his wife for some years. In 1986 my father brought my mother home (the marriage had been registered in 1984) and in 1987 after I was born and after ma got a job in the village school, we moved to a plot on my grandaunt’s land a few kilometres away. My siblings Gulam and Salma were born here. Our youngest pehi stayed with us to complete school and college.

Baten uncle didn't have much education. Our second eldest pehi says that he used to be an incorrigible truant. Assuming that he wouldn’t do well in general school, granduncle Arfan decided that religion was better suited for him and got him admitted in a Muslim seminary. But he proved his general dislike for all knowledge and ran about in his kurta pyjamas and prayer cap and tormented his classmates. Granduncle was frightened by this display of blasphemy and pulled him out of the seminary and had him work on the farm. He married a few years later and his first son Saiful was born in 1982.

When our grandparents were still alive and our youngest pehi stayed with us, she used to take us to our ancestral home every vacation for a day. It was a wonderful two mile walk and we looked forward to it. There, we had two lunches- one at Baten uncle’s house and another at Ghiyas uncle’s. Our dadi (grandmother) would cook us a meal once a while but she generally gave us excellent snacks- roasted corn and seasonal fruit from her trees. Baten uncle would pluck litchis from our ancient litchi tree, catch an excellent carp or kill a pair of pigeons. Once we had eggs with jackfruit seeds at his house. His wife had polished the seeds ivory white on the grinding stone and boiled them tender. Salma, then about four thought they were yolks of hard boiled eggs and was very excited. To humour her (Baten uncle used to call her putul or doll), he scooped spoon after spoon on her plate until she was round and happy. She had to skip the second lunch of chicken and small fish.

Uncle had three sons and two daughters. He had some hopes for his children, so cousins Saiful and Mary stayed at our home and attended school. They used to call my parents Jetha (uncle) and Jethiamma (aunt) at home and Sir and Baideu (madam) at school. Sometimes they mixed up the two set of terms and we laughed over it. In 1992 abba got the license for a printing press and Baten uncle came to help him in the evenings. Abba employed two other men and Ghiyas uncle, after repeated failures in many businesses, also worked in the press for some time. One of abba’s cousins also came a few times but one day he thrust his hand into a motor and got his fingers crushed. He left, continued his studies and became a very successful veterinarian. After finishing school, Saifulda worked here for a few years before leaving for another larger press in a small town across the Brahmaputra river. Mary discontinued her studies and went home.

In 1994 Kalam uncle married Amina mahi (maternal aunt), my mother’s younger sister and bought a six bigha plot in a neighbouring village. He had already taken up the post of a teacher in the same school where ma and abba worked. Baten uncle worked on the little farm and helped him dig a half bigha pond. Another of our uncles, Humayun Kabir, was working in Guwahati as a pharmacist. Abba made a rule that none of the government employed brothers could demand paternal property. He and dada (grandfather) then divided the land in our old village amongst our four younger uncles. The large pond was partitioned between Baten uncle and Boynur uncle.

In 1998, our eldest pehi Jamila shifted to Barpeta after peha’s retirement and abba bought their house and shifted the press into it. Dadi died the same year. Granduncle Arfan died in 2000. Abba died of renal failure in 2001. Overcome by old age and the sudden deaths of his wife, brother and eldest son within a span of four years, dada turned senile. With all the elders gone, the family fell into chaos. The mosque encroached on our house in the market and encouraged by it, Baten uncle encroached on the six and a half bigha land my father had bought from granduncle. There were constant readjustments of land boundaries in the old family plot. Trees that defied boundaries, trees that my father had lovingly planted were cut down. Noor Alam uncle sold his portion of the plot and bought a smaller one in the same village half a mile away. To make things worse, Boynur uncle’s young wife didn't gel with Baten uncle’s family. Small matters took larger proportions and there were constant quarrels. Dada died in 2006 and a few months after his death, our grandparents’ house, built by abba and his brothers was pulled down. The roof, walls and doors were divided amongst the three of my uncles who still lived on the plot.

In 2007, a terrible thing happened. A dispute over a pressure cooker between Boynur uncle and Baten uncle’s wives turned into a knife fight. Ghiyas uncle rushed to Boynur uncle’s side and Humayun uncle who had come from Guwahati on a visit joined the opposite party. Things heated up very fast and before the neighbours could intervene, Saifulda fell with a deep wound on his back. He died on the spot. Boynur uncle received multiple slashes on his arms and stomach and Ghiyas uncle was slashed on the cheekbone. It was Friday the thirteenth, April. In the case that was filed, Noor Alam uncle who was at school and Kalam uncle who was in Guwahati were also implicated. They were advised by their lawyers to stay away from the village for three months. Boynur uncle and Ghiyas uncle were jailed. Their terrified wives were given sanctuary in our and Kalam uncle’s houses. Baten uncle took to drink.

The same year, our youngest pehi got married. The family drifted farther away. Long before that the trips to the old village had stopped.

In 2009, things started improving. We won the case against the mosque. One day Salma and her friend Asma, granduncle Arfan’s youngest daughter were cycling in the old village (the road was now metalled and many of the familiar bamboo groves on the sides had been uprooted) when they decided to pay an impromptu visit to our old home. Baten uncle and his wife gave them tea and talked to them and they had an enjoyable evening. In 2010, Baten uncle started feeling the first symptoms of the disease that would consume him. Mediators outside the family circle said that it was high time the brothers made up with each other. So Kalam uncle put shame and anger behind and talked to his prodigal younger brother. The meeting was sober and emotional. In December 2010, Kalam uncle decided to throw a feast to celebrate his youngest daughter Lucy’s akika (birthday). Elaborate plans were made and all branches of the family were invited. Before buying the bull for slaughter, he went to Baten uncle’s house and pleaded with him to see through the whole event. Now that I look back, I can never thank my uncle enough for doing that.

On 29 December 2010, I was at the bank in the morning, so I missed the Quran reading and the prayers. But I came in time for the actual feast and when I did, I almost sat down and cried. The old feeling of sitting on my father’s knee watching my uncles move from table to table serving food, bringing the kheer from the open kitchen, laying out the rice on banana leaves for drying returned. This was the first time the clan was meeting after dadi’s funeral feast in 1998. Baten uncle was at the helm of affairs once again. From packing meat in polythene bags for the poor to dropping fried fish into curry to scolding the cleaning boys, he was doing it all. All around were old and new faces- aunts and grandaunts had turned heavy and matriarchal. In their places were their younger versions in careful lipstick and make-up and deep blouses. Instead of me, my siblings and my cousins, there were nephews and nieces running and screaming around. The smells were the same. The guests laughed and told the same old jokes. Even ma was being bossed around by Baten uncle’s wife as in those good old days.

That was the last day I saw my uncle Abdul Baten. I returned to Delhi on the first of January. When I was informed about his illness, I was worried. And this morning, when Gulam phoned to say that he had taken the long road, I could only groan and say,
“Oh no! Oh no!”

Untitled 54

One monsoon morning when he was ten,

Nana was granted his first set of new

Clothes- a vest and a lungi.

After a decade of semi-nakedness

And his father’s over sized rags.

“I laughed and I cried", he is said to have told

His four daughters decades later.

“I wore them once and folded them up for Id”.

His white vest and white blue lined lungi.



One monsoon morning when he was ten,

Dysentery felled Nana’s elder sister

Three fallen teeth and a hundred stories older

They didn’t have the coins for a two meter shroud.

They buried her that rainy day

They buried her in that white-blue dream.

“And I stood in the rain”

Nana is said to have told my ma and her sisters,

“And cried shamelessly”

That white blue-hemmed lungi.




Nana- Maternal grandfather

Lungi or longyi- Long loose skirt worn by men.

Moments of life’s clock

(Translated from the original Assamese, Jiyon ghorir pratitu pal by Dr. Bhupen Hazarika)


As if every moment of life’s clock
Has melted away

Only an ant of loneliness
Stagnates on it.

Wonder why
Blood has become bereft of cells.

I am left
With a cluster of
Pestering germs.

Disharmonic rhythm, hollow melody
Chaos in this concert of my memories

As if days have turned into
The homeless gulls of sea shores.

And light
Has got lost
In the horizon of darkness.

(First published in Quills 20009, the annual journal of the Department of English, B. Borooah College.)

My Gossamer Night.

(Translated form the original Assamese, Bimurta mur nishati by Dr. Bhupen Hazarika.)


Gossamer, this my night
Woven from threads of silence-
One blue sador;
In one of its honeyed folds
The warmth of breath
And living love-
One blue sador.

Passion’s blood red
In this night’s deep womb
And silent love’s torrents
Of many many monsoons;
In one of its honeyed folds,
The breath of warmth
And living love.

Falls down an expected
A muffled reverberation
Of a loving voice
Her loving voice.
Boundless is the restlessness
Of two dewy lips
Two quivering lips.

This, the rule for felling rules
On this law-craving path.
Tender thrusts and thrusts returned
On the blue night’s stage.

From the banks
Of distant rivers of screams-
Cries.
Yet, carelessly I sink
Into this sea
Of caresses.
In one of its honeyed folds,
The warmth of breath
And living living love.

(First published in Quills 20009, the annual journal of the Department of English, B. Borooah College.)

Dighalipukhuri

One claw on a bar,
and the crow
lifts the other to his lips
and blows the day's first puff.
His view races the smoke through the fencing,
conductors spank their buses on-
“Dighalipukhuri. Dighalipukuri.”

Long pond.

He stares at a chirping he can never touch,
at entwined buds,
and pigeons floating together in air bubbles,
and lovebirds in love rows,
their heads under their wings.
His downy heart bleeds over the bliss beneath.

At home his vulture
awaits him,
the spear in her hair and
a carcass in her beak.

Here he makes his day long,
sometimes swoops down and scoops up a
beakful of love from the face of
Dighali.
Love like the blushes of hyacinths
skimmed behind the boats.
The trees smell of Duryodhana's incense
and Bhanumati's anklets still tinkle beneath the paddle-boats,
her turmeric and potfuls of milk
and wedding tears
and a few thousand years of love.

He will return to blow the night's last mists.


(Dighalipukhuri,literally 'long pond', situated in Guwahati is an ancient pond frequented by lovers. It is connected by an underground tunnel to the river Brahmaputra and was supposedly dug for Duryodhana and Bhagadatta's daughter Bhanumati's wedding bath.)