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Calcutta Forever
She is not quite dead nor dying
This multitudinous lady
She is living
And forever will she live.
Her house is no more a home
Where life may thrive
It is falling apart
Brick by brick
At the gate
Her son a pimp
Starving and stark naked
Sells her daily
Freely in Free School Street
Yet she thrives in another place
Where her other sons colonize.
Overlooking the Museum
The Maidan is maddeningly green
Now with patches of grey
On this chessboard like pawns
Her sons play
A game with death
In the dead of night
With balls of lead shot from behind.
They embrace death defying death
And their young blood
Seeps into the soil long dry
To regenerate the Maidan into an evergreen.
Her pock-marked pavements
A perennial fight
Against the highways of life
Are claimed by a tide
Surging from a primeval source,
After a long drift
It strikes its deathless roots
In every nook and garbage heaps
While parasites take their flight
Into the multistoried sky
Or burn themselves insect-like
In Park Street’s purple lights.
The great bridge is astride two worlds –
One rising while the other subsides.
The swelling multitude nakedly multiplies
Under naked lamp-post lights
Seeking its primal roots
In deposits of time
When those three sleepy villages
Agelessly dreamt
Rocked by timeless lullabies and rhythms
Of cycling life –
A mammoth anachronism
Her accretions of time
Collapse in on themselves
In dust and debris and lime.
–
Kumud Biswas
June 22, 2003
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