Anindita Sengupta

The Vivid Stream

Who found you, father, on the bathroom
floor that night? Sunk. An upturned
tanker spilling blood like oil, making
runny maps on green ceramic tiles.
I washed stains on hands and knees.
Nothing would scare me again.

Here, suspended on the banks
of an anxious river, pepper climbs
the dark. Cricket cries scythe
through grass. A burst of stars overhead
like pearls in the sky—it’s a sticky kind
of peace. I’m thinking of you
though I’m pretending to read.

Back in the city, I wrap my ears
around other people’s thoughts
and cradle love in my hands
like a bruised bird. My words swirl
like smoke in my mouth.

You required energy. I have nowhere
to spend it now. I miss the discipline
of worship, the head slicing
cleanly through air to drop
at someone’s feet, the hands
which turn to jasmine,
the bent body.

*First published at Eclectica

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Snails

Smelling their way up walls, do they file details,
each crest and dent, the topography

of upswing? I kneel in soil, watch their veins
blue the dark, imagine damp skin-quiver

under luminous crusts. I want to become
one of them—compact, hermaphrodite,

fixated on the single goal, gliding easily
over sharp objects. Perennial innocents

with a mantra of slowness, they never seem
to doubt their hump-backed ascent.

Do oracles guide their feet? I too want
to lose the addiction of speed, be as certain.

*First published at Eclectica

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Separation

I should not will the months by so quickly.
Living is something that happens elsewhere
while one is chewing pencils or hair,
or staring out of the window,
watching the wall splinter
with cracks in the whitewash.

Half in my skin and half hanging out,
like leaning from a Mumbai local in rush
hour, I jamb doorways with my feet,
continually moving in or out, while
you lie on your back in some suburban sunset
and bite the skin of your fingers wistfully.

These weeks we’ve built between us will go.
Even their most grueling chores – forgetting,
forging, defrauding – will not last. Only
the leaves changing season, only
the keyboard glowing in the night
will remain as we write. Confabulate. Lie.

*First published at Nth Position

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Speaking in Tongues

Five years, you dead -
Nothing’s changed in here.
In here. Outside,
landscapes have churned
like giant cement crushers.
Wars. Bans. Elections.
And malls have blossomed like toadstools
on every major street.

Here, I sit
chewing my lip skin,
chewing my bones,
cleaning things
in a purple, cloying frenzy:
window panes, ovens, venetian blinds.
Scrubbing at grease, dust, dead insects,
the disgust of years.

I want everything to sparkle.

Tomorrow, I will meet ma at Levitate,
buy silver earrings, beady bags,
boho hats I can never wear
anywhere polite.
(You said ‘be dignified’.)
Ma will pretend to approve.
She’s trying to compensate.
She’s been trying to compensate
for 30 years. Your cross
slung across her shoulders
like a workman’s axe.

When I loved a man a lot like you
(genius-sadist who ploughed my heart
until raw), she let me talk about him
for 18 whole months
until I could breathe again
without spilling words like marbles
from my mouth.

But tomorrow, we will not talk of you.
We will shed this obsessive
hating and loving of a dead man.

We will try to find a different language,
a tongue that could have been ours
if we hadn’t been impaled
by your eyes, always,
somewhere in between
apology and rage.

One that was almost ours.

These days, we no longer exchange
wordless looks across the room.

*First published at Nth Position

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*First published at Poetry Friends

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To Shakti

I have seen you sometimes,
a yellow sky wrapped around you
your face beautiful as a cyclone,
glowering at the salty rim of the horizon

or wreaking havoc at the beach
tearing up arms and legs, tossing them to sea
faster than any wave can catch.

At the temple, I catch a glimpse
of your face, obscure and absurdly smiling.
It is not how I pictured it.

The priest waves me on. Outside
a gaggle of beggars, upturned hands
like neatly unfurling buds

and a million stone steps
which I walk with crystal feet
praying my ceaseless prayer:

You of unfailing memory,
give me the strength to forget.

*First published in Yellow Medicine Review.

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The Patio

This is the space of distilled things.

Sunlight filters through the jagged
red edges of leaves and a Carnatic raga
in the house across the street
is pleasanter for being remote
and beyond my control. Still further,
the faint sounds of delighted shouts
over something surprisingly found.

Pale-headed Anthurium speckle
the green. Pure. Spatulate. Each
tentatively nodding flower holed
with little flecks of emptiness
where body should have shone.
The snails have been at it again.

Oil lamps in bright pink, gold and
green, now extinguished, are calm
as a row of Kathakali dancers at rest,
their masks off, hands still.
The night’s festivities are over,
they seem to say, and it is time
to seek the darknesses.

I gulp the cool, clear rustle of air.
Its sharpness on my tongue is the
memory of unripe berries, peppermint,
orgasm. I curl my toes into moist soil
hear the earth cake between them.
I will walk to the store this way
barefoot, earth-smudged, sated.

*First published at Cha: An Asian Journal

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Older

A green-burn howl slithers along the pavement
slick with rain and fallen Cassia buds.

My father’s corpse was dragged reluctant
through these streets, dry as a winter sheath,

coarse and brown like a crumble of leaves,
stale-smelled, arranged into neatness.

The walls of his house, once white, pinked
with the seep of his blood in crannies.

The beams loosened and started in sudden fits.
The pillars leaned together in sighs.

Sometimes when I wake at first light,
cold with thirst, the rattle of wind in my chest,

I look to left and right for a hand that moves,
prick ears for the swung window, the rustle

near the old grandfather’s clock with the round
face, and am never quite sure that it’s not there.

*First published at Quay Journal

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Obando

dance to the knock
of bamboo sticks
on moonlit streets.
the mid-May
swelter curves
in between your breasts
and drops its tang
into your throat.
with your hips,
the world revolves.
dance
like a roar in the streets,
an ocean stampeding
past the houses,
a bustling, foamy pour,
mad and glinting
with excess.
and love
your dancing neighbour!
for she wants
the same things as you
and when you look
into that childish face,
into those need-mad eyes,
you can forget
what went before.
and love
your dancing neighbour!
for in her, you are mirrored.
your elbows,
your swan-like ankles,
your valleys and rivers
and the boats you sail in them,
the triangle
of your body and the
roundness of your pant
in her, you see them all.

*First published in Yellow Medicine Review.

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Mourning

Mourning is messy business.
It’s not a flat plane from here
To there. It’s uneven
like the ridged underside
of your tongue, the slip
and fall of words, stalagmites.

Death is not clean. It’s all
black maw and smell of rot,
dreams of bats and dust,
gutters and ghosts.
The only precise thing
are the limbs, their

geometric stillness. Ignore
the radio static in your head.
Maintain decorum. Do not
run after the hearse in a dirty
nightgown. Do not howl wolflike
over the body. There is no live

thing trapped in there. It is not
a mistake. There will be no
scratching at the door
or under the earth at midnight.
Do not drink unnecessary
amounts of water; the rasp

is just the beginnings of a sore
throat, not the start of something
cancerous. Do eat.
The digestive system
is your one, unassailable proof
of being alive.

*First published in Mosaic, a Unisun anthology

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I Remember Siachen

I remember Siachen.
Mostly because you came back from it
but not to me.
You wanted freedom, you said,
from both war and love.
And I, who had breathed less each night
thinking of you in ever-thinning air, thinking
of your face shrinking, of its broad planes
becoming sharper in the cold,
in your wait for something to happen,
for heroism to swoop like a bird,
thinking of the way you danced,
and waited by the phone,
licked envelopes with a dry tongue,
watched mosquitoes settle on my foot like beauty spots
and all that time, wanted to lick the snow off your lips,
I put the receiver back in its cradle.

I took a flight to Pune to make love to you
to show you how perfect it could be.
I cried on the way back
and vowed that I’d never love an army man again,
a man for whom death was the only tragedy
worth remembering.

*First published in Mosaic, a Unisun anthology

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Codes of the Body

There is shame (I’ve heard) in things that concern the body
I try to forget its call and yet I yearn the body

Ash is air. Water expands with light. Flowers decay.
Hold these secrets in your hand when you burn the body.

Degrees gather mold in the old, neglected cupboards
Now, your mad dance is a bid to–what? Learn the body?

“The body is sacred”, poor fool Whitman forgot this fact:
Sanctity has a stiff price. One must earn the body.

In bedsores and in boredom, life passes by grimly
Play the radio. Remember to turn the body.

Like new leaves in rain, I turn green in your passion
I fear this love will blast the soul, even spurn the body.

When you are gone, I will wear black and roam the streets
Let them call me mad; I will not return the body.

*First published in Mosaic, a Unisun anthology

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Arambol

The smell of hashish in the air is a dancing
thing. The girl’s small, curved hands are

like two shells in sleep. The bartender
raises his foot and brings it down on a

crab, spilling its meat onto the sand, leaving
a pattern in entrails. I eat my tuna salad.

The boys on the beach turn over in their sleep
and the one-eyed man in the café cups

his face thoughtfully. Such violence
on gentle shores is common.

In the distance, a blue boat is a blemish
I could rub away, a

transgression. The beach continues to
burn in its silent, unstoppable way.

*First published at Cha: An Asian Journal

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A Violence Done

The sugary smell of aftershave
bursts over her skin like bubbles.
The taste of rotting leaves
in her mouth and behind clinched
eyelids, the black churns
like gnashing seas. Her legs
cycle the air so tightly.

Against the murky pane,
a fly drums its hope
with a single pair of wings.

The fan is white, flecked
with brown, noiseless. Outside,
the sounds of an ordinary day
never cease.

All the way back in the bus,
the smell clings to her
like a low-grade fever.

Her dull stare is on the sea
and one small hand
clenched tight around the ticket.

*First published in Pratilipi

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The Nizam’s Wives

Four girls in brocade,
tussar and stiff smiles, the
slow stranglehold of gold
on their hands, necks, faces.

They were the children who aged early.

Were they friends? Did they
share their fractured power
while swapping dolls, diamonds
and nights? Or were their eyes
darting and vicious over the pudding?
Did they avoid the bath at certain times?

Perhaps, three of them colluded
against the fourth, leaving
frogs on her bed, peas
under her mattress, spit
in her tea.

We can’t know. In this
photograph, they are
just four girls. Let out of purdah
frightened and unblinking
into the cameraman’s flash.

*First published at Kritya

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Moonsong

My love
shames rivals into oblivion,
obscures them
until all that remains is my orb,
the sky’s gleaming eyeball,
white as sand
on foreign beaches,
hollow as dust.

You slid in
to find mountains, craters.
and lava spew.
Now you are afraid
of my solitary anger,
the coiled serpent
at the base of my spine.

You are afraid
of its nameless hungers,
its slow uncurling down the length
of your body.

You are afraid
it will stalk you in dreams.

You are afraid
of my haunted face in the night,
my fragilities –
the soft space
at the base of my throat,
the fine line of my collar bone.

You are afraid they will unravel you.

You who have spent a lifetime
simplifying yourself.

*First published in Pratilipi

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The Migrant’s Wife

When the wind comes down from the hills
and palm trees fling their leaves about
like Sufi saints stepped off the edge,
she lies on a mat on the floor,
arms out,
and listens to coconuts falling on the roof
like tough-shelled meteors.

In her, quiet,
is the cry of marauding elephants
Grey. Heavy. It flattens her.

Parvati, woman of the foothills,
woman of hard hands and bright teeth,
woman who endlessly waits.

Woman whose waiting is a wound
that will not let skin
close over it,

A wound full of tree, grass, rain
and the smell of mud

Woman who bears the hollows in deep places
but feels herself break
with the slow burn,
the stench in the night
of things growing old.

*First published at Kritya

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