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),<
br />
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,
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