Sweet Shop Read online

  AMIT CHAUDHURI

  SWEET SHOP POEMS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Sweet Shop

  Nakur

  Just As

  Shyamalda

  Petha

  To My Editor

  Refugees

  Spectacles

  Creek Row

  Tarting Up

  The Left

  Bhim Nag

  Embrace This Sadness

  Fingers

  Love

  Chhana

  Can You Tell Me

  Terror (after Rustom’s)

  Faltu

  Adil

  Seeing (in) the Dark

  Keystone

  Kalbaishakhi

  The Killer Punch

  Ma

  Sandesh

  Tapas

  Telebhaja

  Notes in Mid-Air

  The Garden Path

  Sadness-Joy

  Notes to the Poems

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  Also by Amit Chaudhuri

  Fiction

  A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)

  Afternoon Raag (1993)

  Freedom Song (1998)

  A New World (2000)

  The Immortals (2009)

  Odysseus Abroad (2015)

  Friend of My Youth (2017)

  Non-fiction

  D H Lawrence and ‘Difference’ (2003)

  Clearing a Space (2008)

  On Tagore (2012)

  Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013)

  Telling Tales (2013)

  The Origins of Dislike (2018)

  Poetry

  St. Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)

  Short stories

  Real Time (2002)

  For Radha, than whom nothing is sweeter

  Sweet Shop

  The whole universe is here.

  Every colour, a few

  on the verge of being barely tolerable.

  Every shape as well as minute flourishes

  created in the prehistory

  of each sandesh by precise pinches.

  The horizontal trays

  brim (but don’t tremble) with mass and form.

  The serrations are near-invisible.

  You’d miss them if they were deeper or clearer.

  The soft oblongs and the minuscule, hard

  pillow-shaped ones are generated

  so neatly that instinct alone

  could have given them shape, and no mould.

  In the harmony shielded by the glass

  is an unnoticed balance of gravity and play.

  Nakur

  Nakur!

  I knew you by name.

  You didn’t even populate

  my background traffic in allusions.

  I wasn’t aware I was aware of you

  till that afternoon, when you were half a mile away.

  I didn’t know if you were a sweet or a shop

  or a name

  or a word in Bangla.

  But when I turned left to the lane and you were there

  I greeted you over-familiarly.

  Past the entrance through which only

  staff enter I saw a sanctum,

  a temple-space, high on whose walls

  hung no secular photograph

  but mortal or mythic divinities.

  But in the front where a group milled

  was pure box-office—an ancient grille

  through whose one square gap an arm

  retrieved notes and boxes changed hands.

  Is it your sandesh that

  has pullulations, like a face

  that’s broken out in fever, or did I

  imagine that? Others bought;

  I, a flunkey on the pavement, stood

  on the margin taking photos on my phone

  of you, the grille, the tubelit shade,

  and the crowd. I did not eat

  or taste you, but entirely

  consumed you and your customers.

  Just As

  Just as jewellery,

  moist cells shining,

  or scented erasers you cradled at five,

  each carrying

  an elephant or tree

  or dog, are too delectable

  to be spent on their own purpose,

  but ask to be eaten,

  so sandesh

  in its untouchable

  heterogeneity

  is displayed behind the pane

  as in a museum

  to be stared at and historicized.

  Shyamalda

  Shyamalda—

  you had possibly travelled

  over a thousand miles

  when, once,

  on our way to Rishra,

  pierced by hunger, you chose

  to stop the car and alight

  for a sweet.

  Hunger impelled you to those windows

  behind which, around hard sandesh

  and the ooze of cham cham and the yellow

  puddle of rabri a haze

  of insects were hovering or swimming or climbing

  as on an island without a human being.

  The ants, though touched

  by the mishtis’ resin, had

  laboriously freed themselves

  to ascend slopes; the flies,

  enlarged by these environs, banged into each other.

  I asked you how you brought yourself

  to eat a specimen from that tray

  —‘What if there’s something on it?’—

  and you laughed like a girl and invoked

  the Bengali imperative of hunger,

  evidently more immediate than sorrow.

  ‘I would flick it off, and eat!’

  You waved away in a gesture

  the invisible living creature

  as if dismissing some stupid universal decorum.

  Petha

  You’re not from these parts.

  You lack the pedigree

  that politesse determines.

  Despite your abundance

  you’re made negligible

  by our intolerance of translucence.

  Those who love you

  are a different breed.

  What you are is a scandal:

  the corpse of some chalkumro

  turned anaemic and crystalline

  as a princess’s breast

  and imbued with rose-water.

  The middle class ignores you

  and would be shocked

  by how you burst in the mouth and dissolve

  immediately like a thunderclap.

  To My Editor

  I met you over twenty-six years ago.

  Your strange name preceded you.

  Your fanciful grandmother

  had named you ‘dewdrop’, but

  your matter-of-fact manner

  was dew-like only in

  its noticeable transparency

  though it did hide your simplicity.

  At that birthday party

  of a new acquaintance’s

  in a first-floor room overlooking

  a medieval street,

  a papier mâché butterfly

  stuck vividly to a wall,

  I asked to see you again.

  You confess you were surprised.

  Self-contradictorily,

  you said later I’d always felt like family.

  Your encounters with my writing

  were undecided. My

  nerves were jangly. At what

  point you became the one

  with whom I’d share my words

  first, I can’t remember.

  The inaugural sacrifice

  you made was typing out

 
my dissertation on a college computer.

  I’m beholden to you

  for deleting unneeded words

  when I can’t find a way of losing them.

  You are merciless, sometimes

  indiscriminate, about

  banishing objects, even books,

  you consider clutter, but

  are judicious trimming content.

  In spite, or maybe because,

  of you astringently correcting facts, we have

  been reasonably at peace for twenty-five years.

  Refugees

  Refugees are periodic

  like daffodils.

  Biennial or triennial or

  recurring at great intervals

  unlike daffodils

  they aren’t expected

  or recognized when they’re back.

  Remember, R, two decades ago,

  when we saw those nervous fairy-tale

  women near Victoria,

  some tired, with infants, irises

  like lapis?

  We’d never seen anyone like them.

  We were in our thirties and easily thrilled.

  They’d come out of a history book

  but were ungainly and insistent

  like those who find they can’t find their way home.

  They had enough English and gumption

  to pursue you and me for money.

  We dove into a black cab

  and went to Highgate to have lunch with Dan.

  (All of us migrants; our appointments

  ascertained on the phone two weeks before.)

  Months later, we saw them again

  selling flowers at a traffic light.

  They were still unreal, like disbanded

  dancers in their head-scarves

  peering opportunely into car windows

  or sitting, bored, with a child on the kerb.

  Bosnia was on everybody’s lips

  and old words like Balkanisation had made a comeback.

  Then, once more, they lost their modishness

  and urgency.

  The women must have found new clothes or

  gone back home

  or found somewhere to stay.

  Spectacles

  The twitching to existence

  of a missing limb,

  the abrupt reflex

  of something not there

  is not a memory;

  it’s

  an expectation

  of the familiar.

  It—or whatever

  it was that was us—

  is presumably unmindful

  of erasure.

  A part of ourselves

  at that instant registers

  the absence.

  Spectacles too

  are a limb of sorts—

  part exoskeleton,

  unretractable.

  When they became

  my body

  I neither know

  nor wish to.

  Momentarily seeking

  my likeness in the mirror

  I decide to adjust them

  though they aren’t there.

  Creek Row

  Between the road Sealdah-ward

  and College Street

  you are a thin, short-lived,

  decaying corridor.

  The point of zipping through

  your oesophageal aperture

  is not just to diminish

  time, but tour the interior

  body-part of history,

  to feel no light and brush past

  stone porches and unparted slats

  as if one had entered

  neither as spirit nor solid

  the carcass of an old, old being

  then burst out like a breath

  into the present’s pungency.

  Tarting Up

  It’s time

  to go out.

  I’m not tired of writing

  but

  of that instant

  when the book must step out again

  like a woman

  who rises at evening

  and vacantly studies the door,

  opens it, flinching

  at the onrush of the street.

  Before meeting the outside

  you begin to tart up, choose

  an eye-catching photo

  for the jacket

  reassessing it like a dress

  you’ve worn many times

  and finger the quotes

  and snippets of praise you know

  too well. They’re jewels

  whose beads

  have minute crevasses, the thread

  is loose, but you

  embrace it calculatingly,

  with a practised poise.

  The best ones you’ve reserved

  for tonight, when traffic

  on the road’s uncaring

  and promising. You’ll flash a smile

  at him, and not look at his face.

  The Left

  The left

  isn’t the other

  hand, it’s the one

  that’s

  the shadow-figure

  outside the doorway—

  always hovering, always near,

  but instructed without edict

  not to present itself.

  Summoned ritually to bathe

  the backside

  it crouches like a Brahmin

  drowning himself in dirty water

  to expunge the sins of another life.

  Then

  after washing itself sombrely

  it goes to a secluded place

  where there’s no danger

  of being touched or noticed.

  Bhim Nag

  Not that deep

  into the North

  but it feels

  the world’s transformed—

  the twin poles

  of the handcart immovable,

  pointedly thwarting

  buses, robust men

  unfocussed yet engrossed

  in everything but the lax, neighbourly goats.

  Unlike the desultory South

  the road has no angles

  and is interminable,

  culvert-like: it and the drifting

  buildings make the journey North

  echo that trip to Venice—the rubbish floats

  on a current.

  Just here

  processions from College Square

  will veer towards the unobtrusive fork

  at Nirmal Chandra Street and make their way

  to Esplanade, intermittently

  protesting a malignant dispensation.

  Here is Bhim Nag.

  Before reaching it, I tasted its doi.

  A pink so shadowy it feels

  the colour’s all but drained away.

  I pick up a pot. It’s the same.

  So uncannily sweet, so close to liquid,

  you swallow it as it lies on your tongue.

  Nothing of the outside is here.

  Legends hang on walls. The interior

  has, despite its abundance, the quiet

  of Ramakrishna’s room in Dakshineshwar.

  On one half of white sandesh rose petals

  rest with funereal simplicity.

  Embrace This Sadness

  Embrace this sadness.

  You cannot embrace the sea

  Or the air

  But you can embrace the future

  Which you turn away from

  Because of its bright emptiness.

  Go to it.

  Embrace the sadness you feel.

  Fingers

  At twelve

  I boycotted cutlery;

  a showy rebellion against a man

  who sat opposite

  and didn’t forgo

  spoon and fork even when he was

  face to face with a chicken bone.

  He smiled (as he would

  in tricky situations),<
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  and raised it aloft

  with prosthetic fervour.

  It was then that my fingers

  discovered life. They plunged into

  its heat. The plate was full.

  They entered the world below.

  Never had they known anything

  like the contact, been so close.

  They eddied and circled round,

  and were half drowned, half consumed,

  by the element they visited.

  There’s no analogy

  for the ensuing transformation.

  Longhand writing,

  for instance,

  is no comparison;

  longhand carried words painfully,

  and didn’t arrive

  late, as my fingers did,

  perfumed with soap, staining themselves,

  stumbling, dancing in circles.

  Love

  So much of the world

  is what we imagine.

  Our illness is like love—

  thirty per cent or more in the head, the rest

  unresolved ailment.

  And our love of this world

  is an illness,

  subterranean, psychosomatic, the causes

  of our being here largely imaginary,

  the cure often

  a sudden change of location.

  Chhana

  It’s taken me time to find

  a true account

  of who we are.

  The provenance of the world

  passed me by

  till recently.

  Three years ago I realized

  that chhana

  was not timeless.

  It was

  brought in by the Portuguese.

  Since then I’m wondering who

  the Portuguese are, and why

  they are now all but forgotten.

  Is chhana

  a gift of consciousness;

  was existence bestowed on it

  by our awareness of

  this curd-like mass

  or was it always extraneous,

  journeying

  from a source?

  Exactly that

  question pertains

  to the Portuguese—

  that, not knowing them, can we

  assign to them veracity?

  These conundrums did not throw

  me out of gear four years ago.

  Can You Tell Me

  Can you tell me

  where to get

  Mephistopheles’s number?

  I want to sell my soul.

  It’s a matter

  of some urgency.

  I’m not sure what it’s worth,