Didriksha

Close your eyes. What do you hear? A dog barking, a car driving past, birds chirping, children screaming? Maybe you hear the splish-splash of the puddles, or the drumming of raindrops. Didriksha heard none of these.

She sat where she always did, playing the events of her life over in her mind. She was born to a middle-class clerk in a family of seven-four boys and three girls. She remembered being beaten up for a reason she hardly understood; her organs of reproduction were different from those that they had desired.

Then there was marriage at sixteen. She had secretly hoped for sunlit days and fairytale nights, but Destiny saved her the trouble of having to remember a new spectrum of events. The beatings started at her husband’s house too because she didn’t bring as much gold with her as her father had promised them. Time passed, and the promised dowry failed to arrive. Cigarette burns, kicks and acid splashes followed. One day Didriksha opened her eyes to find herself within four white walls, with their frocks of fungus and blooms of algae.

This was where she had been imprisoned all these years. It was only once (or was it twice?) in a day that the flap in the door would open and a handful of what was presumably leftovers would be scattered on the floor. It was in the room itself that she relieved herself- the red mixing with the white and the yellow. Sometimes she wanted to cry, but all her emotions seemed alien to her. Sorrow, laughter, life and death were all the same or, nothing at all to Didriksha.

The walls looked at her and smiled their silent, undimpled smile. They had been her oldest companions. They shared a common language- silence. It isn’t a language you and I would understand. It can only be understood by furniture stored away in a room, waiting for a death that they know will never come.

Walls never lie. They told me about Didriksha’s death. They showed me the dark stain on the wall where she had banged her head. They told me about the heaps of rice that accumulated on the floor weeks after she had gone. They showed me the room, within the confines of which lay Didriksha-whose name means, “the desire to see”. But I do not wish to get into those details. Let silence, the language of the walls, act as the catalyst for the realization that all sad stories do not have a happy ending.

And that all Didrikshas don’t die.

While she lies there, dead, the craftsman works in his shed. He moulds the clay taken from the banks of the sacred Ganges into the form of the Mother Goddess, the form in which the feminine force has been worshipped, for centuries.

I wonder why.

The Bioscope

Gazing at the Kolkata skyline on a dusky winter’s evening is a psychedelic experience. Images, sounds and smells related to moments in the city pop up and move, as in a bioscope- black and white.

My bedroom window overlooks a railway station. Every day, I see hundreds of people moving from here to there, or from there to here. Some leave, some return, some run away. There is always a swirling sea of humanity outside my window. They are accompanied by the noise- the shrieks, the screams, the honks, and the loud Hindi music. I am secretly thankful for the bustle and the noise. The pulse of life is infectious.

Strangely, I also love silence. Whenever I feel conflict within myself, I search for peace in the Maidan. The silence of the trees has a healing touch, and the gnarled roots are storehouses of wisdom. The liberating effect of the skies broadens up the mind in more ways than one. While lying flat on the Maidan and looking upwards, I have often empathized with Gilmour, who sang

“Can't keep my eyes from the circling skies

Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I”.

So I walk. The streets of Kolkata have a personality of their own, and a very colorful one at that. Bahurupis, literally meaning those with many forms, walk the city in the attire of gods and animals for pure entertainment. They are homes and beds to an unmatched number of people, and the playgrounds of thousands of “street children”.

My favorite part of the city is old Kolkata. Almost all the crumbling, colonial houses have freedom fighters and martyrs to boast of. The days of the babu culture, of endless entertainment and cultural efflorescence have long gone. However, the houses still haven’t lost their charm and dignity. I am lucky to belong to one such family and I have spent a lot of time in the old Kolkata house. The house is dark and damp and in the dusk of its life. But if you look closely, you will find tiny plants growing out of the walls. The house nurtures life.

The same is true of Kolkata. It lives, breathes and nurtures. The city is a melting pot of cultures. It has representatives from every Indian community, as well as those who have their roots elsewhere, but have made the city their home. As the cultural and intellectual capital of India, there hangs “a something” in the air, which makes one think, reflect and analyze. The hundreds of people who live, work and die here leave bits of them on the streets, in the air and in the sacred waters of the river Ganges. As someone who has bonded with the city, I have absorbed this ensemble of influences and became a bit of Kolkata myself. The city taught me to be sensitive, welcoming, reckless, liberal, dignified. And as the City of Joy, it reminds me to have the right to my orgasm. 

The Ink and Paper Romance

I hear you turn on the tap in the bath
Hot streams of water run down your body
Tickle your groins
And escape between your legs


You walk out and drop your clothes in a heap
Dirty and sweaty
Dirty-
From the long night in a room, airless and loveless
Sweaty -
From the heat of my burning lust, while you slept; snoring

A half-filled coffee cup

Half empty

Half full

Put down impatiently

"I'm getting late for work"

You leave, closing the door behind you

A loud bang

A hard, unsympathetic slamming of the door

The silence shatterns

So do my dreams

I take out a fresh sheet of paper

White and virgin, like me

And dab my pen in ink

Black and beautiful, like you

I scribble on the paper, little nothings

Let the ink glide over its surface

And gush out in bursts of passion

Taking over the whiteness

And destroying its virgin blankness

As a hopeless romantic, I have always loved romances

The only magic in the real, cruel world

It fills me with hope,

Love, longing, and lust for life

The big romance

The small romance

The happy romance

The sad romance

And the most beautiful of them all

The ink and paper romance