Sreemanti Sengupta
T
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hat morning was
different. My eyes felt locked in a cage of dreams. And the bed was floating in
ill smelling semen. I tried to remember last night. In Paris, I was with San
Tiago the street artist who was travelling with me from motel to motel. My life
came back to me in bits and pieces of flesh that I feed the stray dogs on the
beaches of Orissa. I remembered the lady who stared hard through her party mask
and said how inappropriate it was for a late Hippie to turn up for a book
launch. The laugh I laughed walked back to my senses, like a dancer in the
Middle East, teasing me to massage her backside. Or was it the front? I cannot
recall. The backs and fronts and ins and outs collide and converge and push up
like a ball of vomit that’s uneasily trapped in me for centuries. Very soon a
laugh escapes as the vision of a Punjabi wedding hall, the one I sneaked into
one hungry night in Ludhiana. The mountains of food were hallucinogenic..and
soon they were nothing more than tits and asses and buttholes that people lined
up to eat.
San Tiago, like many
other men looking for exotic flowers that bloom in dangerous swathes of
forests, asked me for marriage. The joint almost burnt into my fingers when I
told him off. I told him I was getting fat and I was squinted, I was too vain
and too beautiful, too free and too much of everything. That he was a street
painter, and that all his work was trampled over by cars and feet and pissed on
by dogs. He told me about Beauty and Art. About the inky black roads that lead
everywhere and his Madonnas emerging aka thrusting out like pelvic bones from
the cosmopolitan consciousness. “It is not about how many people stop and look,
it is how much they are disturbed by a nonsensical burst of colour out of the
corner of their eyes. It is like the fly that you cannot kill.”
My throat was parched
for the want of Darjeeling tea. I rolled over and Darjeeling appeared as I had
first seen it, emerging like a comely bride from the windows of a chugging
train. The explosion of green at my window had probably inebriated the little
me. I could hear Ma coaxing me to eat the bread and hard boiled egg. I simply
watched, a sandwich uncouthly stuffed in my mouth. Darjeeling emerged in
intolerably green tea estates past my window. I even waved to some Kanchis
but no one waved back. Later in Geography, I learnt they were intent on
plucking two-leaves-and-a-bud.
.
As a child and often
afterwards, I have been confused about vacations. I had a strong urge to jump
and run in the green fields that the train was carelessly cutting through,
towards the horrible definitude of a vacation. I watched the lapis lazuli sky
over the fields and wondered where colours came from, I almost stretched out my
hand to catch the wings of the flying stork. Soon I would be itching to take a
vacation from vacations.
Teetering on the thin
railings of a balcony somewhere in Mumbai, my drunk mind sang a poem to me.
Rosa was clasping my hand, equally drunk. We had decided minutes back that we
would commit a grand suicide, for we were pained by the terrorist bombings in
Mumbai, that the little boys who were playing with red balloons on the beach,
now had their brains spattered on the sands. Rosa didn’t know much, understood
less. It was a blessing I told her. She had told me not to die. I took breaks
from puking out stale chicken kebab and demanded an answer. “Don’t you see
green fields that rush by a chugging train? Don’t you see white sea gulls
floating over the blue foaming ocean? Don’t you see wild creepers shooting out
of old walls like little rebellions? Don’t you see babies being born out of
nowhere, growing up, marrying and producing more babies?”
I sneer when I think
about Rosa. Rosa was the widow of a man twice her age whom she married when she
was sixteen.
--“But why?”
--“Because he was the
only one who did not demand a dowry.”
-Why did you conceive
so early?
-Because people
started saying I was late.
I remember people
looking at me queerly when I hung around with Rosa. They thought it weird that
girl from a respectable family to be spending so much time with a brown
uneducated widow from a remote Maharashtrian village. I gave a damn of course
and suffered secretly. I suffered when there wasn’t a single soul to pass me a
glass of water when my body was burning at one hundred and four degrees.
Rosa often told me of
her village.
-My husband never
beat me.
-Hmm
-There are homes
where the man just walks off one morning and returns with a wife. A man lives
with as many as five wives in our village and beats them all.
-Uh Huh
- Our neighborhood
is too noisy, with children and women squabbling. The men mostly snore after a
bout of country liquor.
I adore the ocean. I
can sit at its fringes and think about Rosa’s village, about how children are
produced like steel billets. How women are forced to behave like conveyor belts
of babies spilling over on soiled sheets in soiled hospitals. How my
grandmother had dropped one of her fifteen siblings accidentally. She was
little and excited when she heard the hawker calling out wares. In her rush,
she had placed the new born too near the edge of the bed. It had rolled over,
fallen and died after breaking a hip bone. Nobody cared, there were fourteen
others, and soon the mother would bring more.
San Tiago tells me I
am too vain for my ideals. I am as common as the strip dancers at the
streetside dance bars and as exotic as Caribbean folk music
.
I get up naked and
strut around the dingy room. It seems that for years I have been travelling
from dream to dream, where one opens gates to the next. I cannot find my way
back. I push my head outside the window and immediately the eve-teasers start
cheering from below. I turn and look down at my cleavage and spare them a
smile. Poor, Poor desires!
It is the lull before
great storm. The sun is about to set on a breathless landscape. I smell the
tense air, anticipating, hoping against hope. The horizon turns crimson in
minutes, a beautiful calm drapes over the high-rises beyond.
In moments, the storm
will arrive.
When I was in school
in that village of mine, in the poverty that sucked away dreams like an octopus
wrapping tentacles around his victim, I sat near the window, and suddenly the
mathematical tables etched with white powdery chalk on the black slate grown
old and weary with overuse, the sensation of the straw mat tickling me under
the skirt Ma had patched up in several torn places, my hair, grown a straggly
length just touching the shoulders, beating lightly with the wind, the heat and
the salt of teenage skins all repeating after the teacher like tightly railed
tracks. I sensed a remote storm building up somewhere, a storm that resembled
hundred years of pent up desires of a squadron of soldiers sent to fight some
war in Siberia. Back when I wasn’t sure what desire meant. Back when I didn’t
know what any of this meant. This, me, here, sensing everything letting go,
melting, dissolving, into a force beyond. Another time I had lost
consciousness, staring into the village pond, feeding the giant fishes and
watching the ripples. The village doctor pronounced that the spirits had
possessed me. I was a cursed child. I felt a giggle escape me when I saw Ma
crying about how am doomed to be an old unmarried maid. Who is going to take
the hands of a poor dark mad girl?
San Tiago and Rosa do
not believe me when I say I was born in a village. That I made my way to the
world.
-Your skin is too
bright. You don’t smell of the earth.
One of my early
lovers complained that my body smelt of endings and death. I had smiled and
pulled him close and switched off the glaring light that seemed to peel off
layers of my epidermis and distribute a disturbing fragrance everywhere. I
could not of course tell him the truth. I am free because I keep running away.
Each escape piling up a like small death in me, like deceased embryos bursting
at the pores of my skin.
When I tell San Tiago
of my lovers, he merely turns his face and plays the flute. He says one day he
shall make a portrait of me at Times Square and then I’ll have no way of
escaping him! “The magic is in spontaneity. Streets and Traffic do not give you
preparation..time is as scant as in the preparation of a Revolution. A
revolution can begin with a baby’s cry in some remote, inaccessible corner of
this planet..it gathers mass like a skeleton gathering flesh..it is the virility
of a single voice that strings together an entire generation..”
It is one of those
days when the bed is unmade and the room stinks of cheap wine. It is humid
enough to trace beads of silvery sweat that balance themselves like ballerinas
on my eyelashes. The sun is down and the darkness is screeching with crickets.
Outside, the ice cream vendor puts me in a daze..
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Sreemanti Sengupta enjoys a world of divided minds. She is an advertising copywriter from Kolkata, India, a poet, a struggling author, an e-mag editor, an elocutionist, previously published in various online journals such as Mad Swirl, Paragraph Planet, Certain Circuits, Bare Hands Poetry, Ppigpen and more including print anthologies in both English and her vernacular Bangla. She founded and runs The Odd Magazine celebrating alternate creativity herewww.theoddmagazine.wix.com/thisisodd and blogs atwww.weareideating.wordpress.com
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