‘Their voices carry the liquid freshness of youth’: Bhaswati Ghosh’s poems about homes left behind

Nostalgic For a Place Never Seen

Brides in some places catch
moonbeams through a sieve.
A ritual insurance on a husband’s
longevity. When she left home,
my grandma smuggled a river
in her eyelids. Sugandha, it was called.
Su-gandha, the sweet-smelling one.
She stole the river so that whenever
she shed a tear, she could smell
the river in the air around her.
An insurance against forgetting.
Her new home had no water near it.
In Jhalokathi, her forever former

home, Sugandha courses on the same
as before. Canals branch out from its cool, aquamarine breadth to steer thirsty
travellers. With a little help, the brook
learns to punctuate herself.
A green dreamscape
holds the water in
a bracket.
A floating bamboo bridge, bony, resolute,
gives a paragraph break to its carefree
run-on sentence streams.
On the edge of a fisherman’s home,
little girls pull toy boats, their giggles
running over the river’s ripples.
In a video about Sugandha, I see a mother
combing her daughter’s hair. Before I know it, the daughter turns into my grandma
and breaks into a song.
“Why don’t you come to our house anymore?” she asks.

Native Dialect

Because she couldn’t bring with her the waters of Sugandha, the river in her village,
my grandmother brought along utterances that smelled of its moist earth. Togo, aamago, eda, oda, komu, khaamu,

the tongue’s catalogue of frank intimacy. The city ordained the refugee to adopt its lexicon – polished words, their sandpaper finish a burden of survival, like living on dry land.

When her little sister visited and Grandma broke into their Barisailya patois, I heard songs of home in the words. Of boat races and river markets. Of a home I’d dreamt of in past lives amid simulated nostalgia.

I watch YouTube videos by young Barisal natives to let rivers of spoken waves gush into my ears. Togo, mogo, kyada, zaamu, chaaul, aaij, kaayil. Their voices carry the liquid freshness of youth. In them, I strain to hear my grandmother.

{Places, Faces, Traces}

Retracing Dandakaranya
for Titti, my grandmother

I search for your footmarks
In the arid, rocky terrain. The
Agility of your feet eludes mine.
The jungle notes you left behind shriek with trauma. Of green groves uprooted from rivers, thrown amid stones and cacti. Yet I sleep restfully. The shrapnel that ripped apart your
nights doesn’t touch me.
Half a century later, the cracking earth has smothered the laughter
of the Adivasi girls you met. The
mountain still burns the same. With their heaves. And the lava of their rage as mining corporations show them their two-penny index. The desert retains some of
your tears – corroded, insoluble.
Those refugee girls you taught? They must be doing well by now. So I tell myself. But look, how like them, like you,
I’m still looking for home. The
albatross refuses to take flight.

{Scents, Tastes, Textures}

Crafting a River

Between the two ends of a loom, a river flows.
The weaver sits on one bank, shaping the river. Warp meets weft, the fabric’s ebb and tide, so
the textile breathes. Creating a river is backbreaking work. You have to rein in the warps through reeds, link each weft in with a shuttle, calculations
done with the math skill of a mother who has mastered keeping her brood together. The river swells with colours, its waves carrying shades the rangrez infused into each thread.
Temples and gardens grow on its banks, paisley pearls and buds bloom on its body. In an ancient city, drooping men weave crimson rivers for new brides.
They murmur the songs of a master weaver who worked the loom and crafted a luminous tapestry without a single hole. A river so whole, it forgot its banks.

{Seasons of the Heart}

Desire and Danger

i. Kalpana Kartik, House No. 44

Through wooded valleys, a convoy of mist laden with terpsichorean dreams, akin to the mischief girlhood finally found breathing room for, passes. In the intimate trust only a forest can offer, desire marries danger. Sight surrenders, feet
and heart leap forth. Arms move skyward to catch filtered sunlight,
then to scatter it as if releasing a thousand canaries from a cage.

ii. Meena Kumari, Pakeezah

On a river bank, a flight
of swallows tears through the sky. A day yawns
into dawn, spreads air like;
a fantasia yearning to give
of itself. When the hour
is magical beyond belief,
the heart needs an ally to
survive. Loneliness after all,
is as real as freedom.

{Water, Earth, Air, Fire}

Thirsty

Bird call will start soon. The room will gather echoes of a backyard drifting across seas. The moistness of memory blotches the seen, the felt, making them apparitions of the once-seen, once-felt. The neighbour plants bitter leaf to mix in her tropical fish soup. An ocean surges in her dry throat. Open the southern window. Hoard unending afternoons before they get frost-bitten.

Let sleep hang in the air while a spotted dove returns with stolen monsoon.

{The Humming Octave}

Bageshree

At the Monday/Thursday class
eight of us circle our guru,
his cotton wool beard just about
eclipsing that concessional smile.
Bageshree holds the room and our octaves together.
We sing to the mountain king’s
daughter. The goddess. Her elephant-headed Son’s mother. A moon-bird to her husband. Does she hear us
over the tanpura’s strains and the vessels in the guru’s kitchen?
Bageshree becomes the night. The night the lovebird can’t cross without seeing its mate. The night a hurricane rips doors apart, douses out
lamps. A night so black, darkness flinches from it. A hollow that lets light in.
The bird flies away, far across, to Norwegian woods. It carries echoes of groves and lovers’ meditations.
Bageshree robs and releases,
carves holes and fills them full. It’s the night you long to be haunted by.

{The Wordsmiths}

Paradise is a kind of

A row of steel cases stacked with spines of varied girth, tickets to adventures, printed. At six, the library, a place where mother works and her colleagues stuff you with pastries and cream rolls from the canteen. At seven, your key to unlocking wondrous doors even as you stumble

against more. Sindbad’s voyages, Baghdad’s bazaars, sultans and emirs with their tantrums hazaar, Dickens’s London hung with despair. A sight of Borges’ paradise, a tryst to

collide with authors. Strange settings, stranger fellows. Tenida of Potoldanga, Professor Shonku, Ernesto in Peru,

Paddy Clarke’s ha ha ha, Maneck Kohlah fading out with a blah. Rabble rousers, wackos, history makers, jaded heroes. The paradise, a hideout as you grow in age and diminish in self esteem. The figures poised on musty spines and dusty shelves, now silent, disarming life coaches. In this windy, noisy, crooked world, the library, an anchor for restless drifters.

{Movements in and Out of Time}

Displacement

Spaces corner me in my
dreams. I enter houses to lose my way and sanity; mohallas I once knew intimately I can’t find my way out of. Classrooms
ask for lectures in ransom before letting me out.
The sleep python
keeps recoiling within itself
and spits out counterfeit memories.
Is this why my bed misses me every time I spend the night in another
city?
The dog in the balcony steps
aside; I’m a stranger in this
house that’s trying so hard to welcome me.

Note: A mohalla (Urdu) is a locality, ward or street.

Excerpted with permission from Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen, Bhaswati Ghosh, Copper Coin Press.