COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING) (ONLINE ISSN 2278-9650 | PRINT ISSN 2278-9642)
NO. 2 | DEC ‘11 | 1.2
ED. ARUP K CHATTERJEE
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
ISSUE II | DEC ‘11 | 1.2
ED. ARUP K CHATTERJEE
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
Coldnoon envisions travel not as flux but instead as gaps in travelling itself. Coldnoon means a shadowed instant in time when the inertia of motion of images, thoughts and spectacles, comes to rest upon a still and cold moment. Our travels are not of trade and imagining communities; they are towards the reporting of purposeless and unselfconscious narratives the human mind experiences when left in a vacuum between terminals of travel.
First published in New Delhi India in 2011 Online ISSN 2278-9650 | Print ISSN 2278-9650 Cover Photograph, Arup K Chatterjee Cover Design, Arup K Chatterjee Typeset in Arno Pro & Trajan Pro Editor, Arup K Chatterjee Assistant Editor, Amrita Ajay Contributing Editors: Sebastien Doubinsky, Lisa Thatcher, G.J.V. Prasad, Sudeep Sen, K. Satchidanandan Copyright © Coldnoon 2011. Individual Works © Authors 2011. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or copied for commercial use, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent acquirer. All rights belong to the individual authors, and photographer. Licensed Under:
Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Dec ‘11, 1.2) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com. http://www.coldnoon.com/copyright/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Dec’11/1.2.html
Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi 110067 India www.coldnoon.com
Contents
Introduction
1
Editorial
7
Brian Wrixon
11
Amit Ranjan
16
Mohan Rana
22
Manash Bhattacharjee
27
Arup K Chatterjee
32
Murissa Shalapata
41
C. S. Bhagya
48
Editorial Board
55
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING Dec ‘11, No. 1.2 | www.coldnoon.com
Introduction by Arup K Chatterjee
Chatterjee Arup K. “Introduction.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 1-6. Web.
Licensed Under:
"Introduction" (by Arup K Chatterjee) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Introduction | p. 1 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Introduction
Perhaps Coldnoon needs to be redefined. It is true that “travel” immediately implies to many people either travelling over a great distance on official or leisurely matters, or a travel across years and ages. While the first one is based on the dictionary meaning of “travel” the second one is idiomatic, and there are a few more dictionary and idiomatic meanings of “travel” as well. Coldnoon was born to highlight those other meanings, alongside the obvious ones. For instance, the “walk” or the “bicycle ride” or the “newspaper” or the “letter” needs to be re-examined. Either they are so common examples of travel that the word “travel” excludes them today in its signification, or they are so forgotten like the spokes of the cycle of the florist who delivers the bouquet to your beloved that the delivery matters more than the subject which covers instead the spokes. But, whatever the subject be, no exclusion of its meanings are intended to be made, although Coldnoon does incline towards certain fundamental aspects related to travel, and more importantly, the watcher of travel, upon a cold spot, one who is presently resting between terminals of travel. With so much, I dedicate this issue to two very old aspects of travel – the walk and the railways. The main reason for the expansion of and misunderstandings caused by a word is technology which unites many usages many languages many customs and generations. We are not always able to grasp the multifarious utility of things that come as new or unvisited by us. So, we take on meanings that may be different from the ones who took before or after us. In Brian Wrixon’s poem “Remembering” technology slows down the pace of the travels of a father and son from a running pace to a reminiscing walk. In “In Darkness, Light” Wrixon blends two historical moments – one of Edison’s demonstration of the first commercial incandescent light in one evening of 1879 at Menlo Park, New York City that thousands flocked to see, and two of Neil Armstrong’s exclamation on landing on the moon: “(O)ne small step for man, one giant leap for mankind – and transforms it into a case of the latter existing without
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the former. The moonlit walks of new lovers, new neighbours and new friends, all descendants of the first bulb-watchers, now in the absence of power electricity becomes a “giant leap” again. The moon was always there, electricity was later. Similarly travel and the railways were only to be followed by the telephone. Ironically it is the “The Telephone Box” on an English hillside that makes Wrixon’s poet persona construct a journey that has been recently made and with its undertakers he can communicate only through telepathy today. Such is the obviating nature of telecommunications that lived journeys fade into oblivion. Travel induces some incompleteness, that is true. Travel is never finished, the desire is handed down again and again – it is a present continuous, a gerundic force. Amit Ranjan’s “Standard Three” brings us back to the root of this motion, the gerund. The secrecy of an unmoving spot which is the parking lot, in this case, becomes an indelible moment of pause in a child’s growth. An uncle took the child to a corner and a “little puppy kept barking” without our knowledge of what really happened. A new gerund had begun, for in that tender age “gerunds came free”. And these gerunds once begun keep spinning on their own, keep driving the traveller without whose knowing whence, whither and why. Likewise, in Ranjan’s “Villanelle of Sardana” the traveller is advised by the “cold marble statue” at the historical Catholic Church to “search for what he must search”. And, so, the travel takes on a new meaning altogether; the poem as Ranjan cautions has nothing to with the history of of Sardana or Begum Samru, or details that generally draw a tourist to a historical spot. Shaking us out of the touristic complacency is also Ranjan’s apocalyptic perception of the railway which all other poets in this issue use as an image of adolescence or of the idyllic. Ranjan surprises with his jarring staccatos on the “Parallel Lines” which I reckon as even a travesty of the national anthem of the nation to which it belongs. Like Rabindranath Tagore’s song Ranjan enumerates travels (and travails) throughout the length and breadth of India experienced by its population in the train. “We owe it (all) to the parallel lines”. One may suspect that our national anthem owes something as well. Mohan Rana remembers the years he has come by over his “Philips Radio”. The radio has taken him past time and distance. He had never known the maker of this vehicle; he did not know where it came from. But now as he
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stands in Eindhoven near the building of Philips Corporation he wonders if it was the same radio that took him and so many like him so far. But meanings of the radio do not still cohere. They do not cohere because what was so distant has now become close like the “nearby sky” from Rana’s “Roads, Black & White”, and that which was everyday and near to the traveller like the anonymous streets and the staple of “sookhi rotis and three ‘o’ clock dal fries” have now acquired a mythical proportion. Telecommunications have made the world so rapid that after a day wrought with the “din” of hectic motion we arrive at the red signal of “Journeys” to find an auto-rickshaw driver disappointed at the red colour of his teeth seen in the chaotic rear lens mirror. Unless it is green and back to motion the world will stay appalled. But how much can one travel? How much can one be curious about? In “Circling and Identity” Rana imagines that travel has been and will be about two very fundamental curiosities – the within and the without. The traveller itself has become the fulcrum around which one travels inward and outward; going round about in a circle. I need, however, remind you all that Mohan Rana’s poems have been translated from Hindi. Therefore, the elements and interpretations of travel seen in his poems and in this introduction have already travelled a good distance from their origin, gathering a plethora of new meanings. Every moment of travel is a double stroke. Manash Bhattacharjee would try to extend it to three strokes if I allowed him. According to him a travel is both lost in time, as well as (represented) away from its historical time. The third stroke in the moment comes when we perceive the traces of the others who have travelled the same road or “The Same Street”, using the title of Bhattacharjee’s poem itself. “The Same Street”, as the poet says, was “not your street”. It did not belong to him or her or to anyone, not even the traveller. In the end we meet a mysterious man who in his previous birth “was either born a toad or a peacock”, which is why he loiters about in the rainfall. Like Fahim and Pooja had left their love-story on the stones in “At Hauz Khas Ruins” this mysterious man (who is in fact poet Amit Ranjan; Coldnoon is delighted to bring together these two poets) leaves his trace in a natural phenomenon, the rainfall. So, when the stones at Hauz Khas are revisited the lovers will come back to haunt, and when it rains on the same street this mysterious man will return.
Introduction | p. 4 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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My poems continue from where I had left them in the last issue, in a series of travel poems that form part of a larger structure namely “Hundred Miles Around Dacres Lane”. Dacres Lane is in Calcutta, and hundred miles is mythical. So the poems are set almost everywhere in the places I have been. In this issue, three of them feature Calcutta and the last one is about a journey back to New Delhi from West Bengal. “On Revisiting Tollygunge Cemetery” is a reconciliation between existing reality and the solipsistic walks of a fanciful childhood. The child persona often both fancies and fears another community, quite simultaneously. This combined with contemplative walks around relics of that community produces ludicrous childhood imaginations that one cannot easily outlive. However, it is not devoid of the growth of spiritual difference and eventually spiritual oneness with the inanimate and sentient, alike. “Rear Window Crimes” (a title borrowed from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window) presents a usual Sunday freezing of time in a metropolis which is so used to motion and chaos that cracks seem to appear in typical middle class family, when travel stops, as seen by a rear window voyeur. Travel mollifies these cracks, travel is all-subsuming, it subsumes the secret and the personal, as does the spectacle of a rickshaw puller carrying a vestigial mode of transport in his hands so that voyeurism gets drawn more and more to this surface veneer and led farther from the private story. Finally, “On the Way Back to Nehru University, New Delhi, in February” relates the unfounded or the unknown guilt of a returning traveller who escapes from one scene of crime to another, always at unease. Travelling and leaving things behind reminds of a primal sin that precedes birth. “The Streets: A Palazzo, A Bridge, A Prison” by Murissa Shalapata manages to exorcises this guilt in no longer remaining the uneasy criminal but initiating a unison with the criminals of the past, and the traces they have left in a Venetian Prison, across the Bridge of Sighs near Palazzo del Doge, in Italy. In “Visions of a San Franciscan Chinatown” Shalapata takes us to Chinatown on her way to finding the iconic bookstore called “City Lights”, after being inspired by Beatniks and Jack Kerouac. However, her attention shifts to a street sign dedicated to Kerouac, his name cemented in English and Chinese, owing to the blinding neon signs belonging to one Margarita Bar. Thus, once again a journey takes an alter-life of its own deviating from the purpose with which it had been started. Shalapata tells me in a personal conversation that
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the Friari Church in her poem “Reflections of Venize: Friari” is her favourite church not only for aesthetic reasons (Shalapata is also a student in Art History), but for the number of artists who have left their paintings as their traces. Three strokes come full circle again and Shalapata does not sentimentalize. When the flock and exchangelings are away and everything evaporates into the smell of Adriatic at once you know it doesn’t matter in the end (“Reflections of Venize: Friari”)
C. S Bhagya begins her “December Walk” with startling emphases on “drifting”. The traveller has lost agency somewhat. She travels almost with the sense of what is to come, but what is just in a deferral, like people, “some who leave and some who leave”, like “this building and that”, like the dying year making dead leaves out of camouflaging dogs. In the end the year is just a “broken door” leading to another, or deferring another. “December’s white logic” and the winter snows are themselves a deferral to their own coming. What comes before, the “yellow plaster” of summer sunshine or the “grace” of Jesus Christ, we will never know. In “Airports” Bhagya reveals that a journey intended as a rendezvous with the airplane has instead become a kaleidoscope of visions and voices at the airport. The flight will be covered in a flash now, but what has just been encountered at the airport has left its undying imprints. It is like seeking an unknowing helper to help her into the knowledge of space and travel, a helper that has to be “marshaled by uniformed men”. By the time she can come to “The City in the Hills” she finds she herself has become the helper and the companion. People mistake her for someone from the mythical city in the hills; people who have forgotten the city and their belongings therein but identify her as someone who knows about their long lost roots. She does not disappoint them; she makes fictions of this city. It is as though owing to the curiosity of another she has gone far into knowing this city only too well. It is time therefore that the traveller must return to fall in love with one’s own place of being.
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Editorial
Chatterjee, Arup K. “Editorial.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 7-10. Web.
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"Editorial" (by Arup K Chatterjee) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Editorial
Dear Readers Of Coldnoon, Readers cannot be driven. Reading itself is a static act. But many readers will argue that they travel new worlds through reading. This means travelling to a new world empowers. Reading is also considered privileged. So, only the privileged have the leisure or means to read, and reading privileges them too. Therefore, in the mind or in the body, the subject is always at travel, and needless to say, not without some privileging brownie points one gathers along the way. When we began Coldnoon we had no intention of empowering readers, or privileging some over others. It has occurred to me, with the receipt of some educated criticism from readers, that Coldnoon has underprivileged those who came to read with the purpose of sight-seeing. To them I apologize. Purposelessness has been root of Coldnoon; purposelessness in travel our sole purpose. Writers ramble without knowing to write, readers gobble words sometimes without referring to dictionaries, the Coldnoon; writers travel maplessly. These are travels to which we have been thrust into, without knowing, without caring, without living or dying because of them. Definitely a holiday, an exploration features here and there but the moot understanding of travel in this poetry seeps from the incoherence of the innumerable objects, symbols and signs of travel that we leave everyday behind. We take the pavement, we look for our bus. We find it, and we are off. Something happens in the family, something good or bad; a friend breaks trust or delights us and we are sedated or excited. We turn quiet or start observing. There is a sense of our stopping, having made a time period for ourselves. It is as if we are overtaken suddenly with all those objects, symbols and signs we had been leaving behind so far. So now appear those numbers of the buses with a greater vitality. Now the ticket counter of the metro starts mattering too much. And
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now we are playing those games in our heads of measuring the inertias of motion of train compartments. Say, for instance “which bogey will stop near me, will the door stop in front of me?” And, so on. From the time we step out to the time we are back we have encountered at least one thousand traces of someone travelling, someone who travelled or someone who will travel – a phone call to a travel agency, a fine-slip for driving without papers, a decision between the main road and subway, in fact the courier that was mailed to our names. Imagine the distance even our names have traversed. These all are incoherent, because our coherence is a product of them. Some people like travelling so much that they travel imaginarily when they cannot act it out. Their fancy starts impersonating their bodies. This question has been asked frequently: why does not Coldnoon; have poems describing imaginary travels? The answer is Coldnoon; is not eventually about travel as much as it is about the locatedness of the traveller at a termination of the travelling act. The significance of Coldnoon; is in that cold and terminal moment when the perspiration of the traveller cools off and discordant images prism into a kaleidoscope. It is about the tired or the waiting traveller; it is about the planning and the return, about expectation and reportage. Whatever we write has already been. Even if the time is a fictitious time to come at least the writer has seen this time. So, it is already past. Therefore we can only write of things after we are through with them. In this regard the Coldnoon; travels are imaginative; they are of mixed experiences from mixed travels. The element of fiction is never ruled out, as it ought not to be. But idea of creating a space or a comfort zone is separate from the idea of the “Coldnoon;” that creates a space of its own around the resting traveller. This rules out the purpose of space itself and induces a contingency of space. Our travel poetry is about relating to this contingency with negative capability. In this way we are not writers of imaginary travel or leisure travels. Let me leave you all with a legend. Once a young prince asked a hermit, “what do you mean by travelling in the mind?” The hermit answered, “I create new worlds with divine knowledge and I walk past them in my imagination”. The prince said, “Your mind travels but your body does not. How strange! When my body travels my mind does not. If the mind does not travel is the travel futile?” The hermit replied, “O young prince that is because only my
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mind has seen these worlds that I tread past every day. It is the task of my mind, therefore, to show the way to my body. The body is fanciful and ephemeral, it will not last. So I do not exert it”. The young prince grew thoughtful. The princely blood in him revolted against the spiritual jiujutsu of the hermit. He was not convinced at all. To remain that way and not react would mean he had bowed before an unemployed beggar. After a while he spoke, “I have seen the elephants tire. They do not have a mind as ours. I have seen leaves fall, and thorns dispersed. They probably have no mind at all. We travel much more than these creatures ever will. But they travel the entire world they have known. What finds their way for them? What mind tells them to travel? You speak as if your mind came first, the world was next and then you travelled. The elephant goes to the same stream every day. The thorny seeds do not cross our territory. Neither do you, but you have already travelled the world. When my body tires the travels of these insignificant livers come clear in my mind. How do you come to know of them, you who claim to know the universal relation in all sentient beings? If your body does not travel, it does not tire. If it does not tire how does your mind remember what it saw? Answer me? The hermit was silent. The king had been overhearing the conversation for some time now. He came forward and greeted the hermit; both of them smiled as they were impressed by the precocious prince’s rhetoric. The hermit offered his blessings to the prince and the king rewarded the hermit for introducing his son to such an interesting problem. However, after that day, the hermit was not seen in the state anymore. The legend has that he left the country for a world tour with the reward he had received from the King. Happy Coldnoon to all.
Editorial | p. 10 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Brian Wrixon
Wrixon, Brian. “Poems by Brian Wrixon.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 11-15. Web.
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Brian Wrixon
Remembering Rolling meadow down our street Father, son run bare feet Happily discovering Butterflies, baby birds, wings Seeds, bugs, nature's things Quietly amazed Then noise Chainsaw, hammer, bricks, stone A single tree left all alone Progress? Nature killed, meadow gone Father and son have walked on Only remembering
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The Pathway In the dappled sun beneath the trees A well-worn pathway leads me on In a forest cooled by the breeze A robin greets me with its song I know not where the path will lead me I am content to walk along its length For one who lives both happy and free It is the journey itself that gives him strength
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In Darkness, Light The growing stillness of a summer's night The music of birds singing, cicadas buzzing Neighbours together, walking, talking The music of people with people Wafting over the stillness of a summer's night Enjoying the darkness A blaze of candles, the glow of oil lamps Food being cooked on open flames New friends laughing, sharing, singing Failure of the power grid Creating new light on a summer's night One giant leap for mankind
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The Telephone Box I sit on an English hillside A village lost in time spread below A peaceful pastoral setting I dream and my mind wanders – I can see the mail coach arriving It stops at the village inn Ladies in bonnets and men with walking sticks Stepping down from the carriage The anxious team ready to press onward – I blink and am brought back to the present As I spy the red call box on the edge of town
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Amit Ranjan
Ranjan, Amit. “Poems by Amit Ranjan.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 16-21. Web.
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Amit Ranjan
Standard Three I was in standard three I thought the gerunds came free I was playing in the park An uncle took me to the parking My little puppy kept barking.
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Parallel Lines In father’s words they were The lines that run to meet And the lines that never meet. And perhaps their value lies in that. While Nehru made a ‘tryst’ at midnight, Millions made a tearful, silent flight, A flight across a line on paper. A crooked line cooked up by crooked ambitions. Parched, Homeless, terrorized, dead and alive, Clustered like a million buffaloes for sacrifice, They undertook the journey across the line On an engine running on parallel lines. It was spring-time, Yet a fifty people were charred In a burning train at Godhra, On the same parallel lines. “Spring is the mischief in me”, Said a ‘moody’ Gujarat And burnt on parallel lines. The bare buttocks of Ghaziabad And the metro-rail of Shahdara Are strewn along the parallel lines. The tunnels of the raining Western Ghats, And the hills of the snowing Simla, And the swirling sands of Bikaner, Are all penetrated by the parallel lines. The eunuchs calling you Shah Rukh Khan, The grimy girls singing for a rupee,
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The chant of ‘Chaiya-Chaiya’ for tea The beggars with less than four limbs; The man getting his boot polished And spitting on the floorThey all travel on the parallel lines. The vast, endless, fallow plains The incessant, enchanting August rains, The 44-degree boiling train, The freezing half-naked bodies shivering in cold pain, The rivers meandering like an endless snake, The summits that never meet, They are all witnessed by the parallel lines. They burst a bomb in the desert And had a dessert in Delhi, And strew the sand In a ‘Gaurav Yatra’ Along the parallel lines. There is on the parallel lines A name with two languages-‘Dehri-on-Sone’. One of the lines was made weak; And one night The blue Rajdhani Fell into the red sand of Sone Off the parallel lines. Lal Bahadur resigned on one Nitish and Paswan could resign on none. All the fun Is seen by the indifferent parallel lines. Twenty-eight states, A hundred religions, Ten thousand castes,
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Three classes, A thousand dialects, Are woven together By the parallel lines If there is a nerve of this nation, (that has not cracked as yet) It is the ‘parallel lines’. Oil, fish and coal And a billion whole Traverse a million miles And owe it to the parallel lines.
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Villanelle of Sardana He wandered off to, and then off an old church In search of someone's mango grove The sweltering heat would leave him in a lurch. On a green canopy, an exhausted eagle’s perch: Through the air burning on a fiery stove It looked as if it was the end of the search. The eagle says, 'I’ll sing a dirge' A dirge of timeless, mighty love He says, 'sing a ballad, I urge'. The eagle says, 'the skies and the earth merge When over hills and rills all day I rove, How does it matter if it's a ballad or a dirge? Like the meandering smoke, you need to surge, Or may be like the breath of the clove, With the heat of the air, you'll have to merge' He goes back to the old church Bows his head in mighty god's love And asks a white cold marble statue to search Search for what he must search.
Sardana is famous for the first Catholic Church in North India made by Begum Samru. Begum Samroo was originally Zebunissa. Walter Reinhardt ‘Sombre’ fell in love with her when she was 14 and he 41. ‘Sombre’ was his nickname based on his perpetual sombre mood. ‘Samru’ is a corruption of ‘Sombre’. Sombre was a mercenary fighter and rose to own the Sardana principality near Meerut. After his death, the Begum inherited the throne, and at a point of time her army was virtually the savior of the Mughal dynasty in decay. Tees Hazari is so called because 30,000 Sikh soldiers had camped in Delhi to overthrow Shah Alam. The Begum’s army drove them away. The poem has nothing to do with all this.
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Mohan Rana
Rana, Mohan. “Poems by Mohan Rana.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 22-26. Web.
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"Poems by Mohan Rana" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Mohan Rana | p. 22 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING Dec ‘11, No. 1.2 | www.coldnoon.com
Mohan Rana
Philips Radio My home grew wizened on its Vivid Bharati Its highs and lows, the fluctuating waves Its knob has forsaken us in our last whitewash Cells heated in the sun turn silent by nightfall In between the headlines Cowering from the rough wind in the open streets, at the heart of Eindhoven I stand near a large building of Philips Corporation I walk the zebra-crossing ponderingly Is it our Philips Radio Translated From the Hindi Poem “Philips ka Radio” From Is Chhor Par, 2003
Mohan Rana | p. 23 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Roads, Black & White Traversing cities, addresses and nameless corners Turning to the left and turning right For miles into the horizon plunging Spiralling often or sloping down Endless forever these twin-born roads The long-bound nocturnal buses, Dhabas, sookhi rotis and three ‘o’ clock dal fries Farms left behind somewhere in darkness The cool scent of Vanaspati And somewhere a dozing scarecrow Beneath the constellations of a nearby sky Translated From the Hindi Poem “Safed Sadak, Kali Sadak” From Subah Ki Dak, 2002
Mohan Rana | p. 24 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Journey Smoke crosses the bridge A river ambles in melancholia A coal-laden truck passes the check-post Power-plant chimneys breathe colour into the Autumn sky The evening’s newspaper is wrapped in a din In a din an elephant goes to its bath Journeys get arrested in this din By the din in his rear-lens the rickshaw driver observes His teeth that are red At a red-signal When will it be green, I wonder Translated From The Hindi Poem “Yatayat” From Subah Ki Dak, 2002
Mohan Rana | p. 25 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Circling An Identity Let us see who lives in this house The hope of some surprise Stands patiently with folded arms Knocking on the door I wonder How ancient this door must be I listen to the breeze disentangling from shrubs, The resonating traffic seeping through their pores I listen to my breath, my rising pulse And wiping my shoes on the doormat I plant my ear on the door It felt someone was approaching from within Closing my eyes, expecting A hand inside to motion, reach out for the bolt As if the eternal sigh spread over the momentous spot Both on inside And without As if I myself, the door perhaps Ever estranging And becoming an Identity Translated From the Hindi Poem “Ajnabi Banta Pehchaan” From Patthar Ho Jayegi Nadi, 2007
All Poems of Mohan Rana in This Issue Have Been Translated By Arup K. Chatterjee
Mohan Rana | p. 26 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Manash Bhattacharjee
Bhattacharjee, Manash. “Poems by Manash Bhattacharjee.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 27-31. Web.
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"Poems by Manash Bhattacharjee" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Manash Bhattacharjee | p. 27 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Manash Bhattacharjee
At Hauz Khas Ruins To Anindita & Richa Mad pigeons play Hide and seek Over silence of stone Voices call out each Other with names to dispel The fear of stone Lovers hold hands And bury time Over secrets of stone We found a claim etched Against the roofless cubicle Of stone: "Fahim loves Pooja" We wondered about Love In a different century
Manash Bhattacharjee | p. 28 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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The Same Street I took you to the same street Which was not your street But a street where I walked Alone or with a friend For days and years and for days Which were years And there was no love and I wondered Along the street and the trees Where is this love along the street Like the sudden face of a stranger Or the face of someone I know But they all passed me by As if I was just one face among many Along this street. And I wondered whether I am meant To catch someone’s gaze Or just be a passing shadow Until you arrived with your ears in your eyes And your heart in your hands I told you stories of this street When you were absent When I didn’t lose company with Myself so that you will find me. We walked this street where it was About to rain And where the sky had disappeared.
Manash Bhattacharjee | p. 29 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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But we scarcely noticed As we were caught up between Our own eyes Until it rained and we looked for shelter. We neither ran nor walked But our steps were in a hurry to find a place Where we would find no place Except our own heads now watered down To our feet and how I always loved your feet Of flowing water And I couldn’t say whether the street was flowing Or your feet from the rain. I recognized you Once again from all the water that was flowing As you were the water flowing Since days over years and a day from a single Life of days of rain and lonely street And the rain brought everything together. In the same street one night we met a man who Told us that in his earlier life He was either born a toad or a peacock And that if we don’t find him Anywhere else we should look for him here in the rain. First published in New Writings from India, Vol. V, Penguin
Manash Bhattacharjee | p. 30 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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The First Train The first train is also the Last train which runs In memory. I remember it was dawn And cold and very wet. I bid goodbye to the Neighbourhood roads as father Urged the rickshaw puller To ride us faster. Father spoke of time More than he spoke of the train. As if we had to catch time Along with the train. The station was a page From a story book. People were stationed like heavy Luggage waiting to be lifted. But father was too anxious to wait. He kept looking at his Watch restlessly as if urging the Train to reach us faster. But soon we heard the train Would come a bit late. Father looked angrily at His watch as he cursed the train. He behaved the same way Every time I was late for school. I felt trains were naughty Children who never arrive on time.
Manash Bhattacharjee | p. 31 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Arup K Chatterjee
Chatterjee, Arup K. “Poems by Arup K Chatterjee.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 32-40. Web.
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"From, Hundred Miles Around Dacres Lane" (by Arup K Chatterjee) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Arup K Chatterjee | p. 32 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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from, Hundred Miles Around Dacres Lane by Arup K Chatterjee
On Revisiting Tollygunge Cemetery Long ago a Mohammedan fantasy Used to creep as we walked the graveside road – The graves of Muslim elders as I knew, As if the younger ones could never die – And I dreamed willingly the dreadful dreams Their long and grey beards of Kashmiri wool It must be them who sing the haunting azaan Those old spirits that have never been free Ma taught me ghosts and God were one She indulged me but left me dream Even when dreams had just begun All ghosts and God would Muslim seem The hospital that stood quite adjacent Has been dilapidating even now "Here is where they die" as I used to think No one has killed me nor I killed any For having such hideous adolescence Today I walk again the graveside road And I am not worth killing anymore Neither the Muslim elders talk to me
Arup K Chatterjee | p. 33 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Ma took me to eat biriyani At the dargah some Saturdays In Prince Anwer Shah's Colony -Still it stunts my sight in a haze Tollygunge cemetery still lies here I do not know when I relinquished it It must have been around my eighteenth year When I totally stopped questioning God When I totally stopped to walk by him Biriyani at dargah was always stale But Ma went to relish some spectacle Was it the dusting off of sins with a broom? I would never know what it was Ma by now has forgotten too The road goes on, the memory follows The walker one, the lives were two
Arup K Chatterjee | p. 34 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Rear Window Crimes I have been watching domestic assault Everything is too verbal to report There is no mustard oil or ginger-garlic So, a mathematics tutor is replaced Since morning it has been so clamorous This Sunday-husband and Sunday-father Reads The Sunday Statesman and a report card And both of them featuring old details Today again is holiday Today no gravity, speed or mass Let us not talk of Faraday "In the next term I will surely pass" Today is Victoria Morning Sunday Today is Kalighat Cricket Coaching The daughter will quietly hide in the terrace With forbidden pages of Sananda The telephone knows Baba is at home But telephone bills can come anytime The morning will clamour in markets and homes Till a Sunday afternoon rattling of trams Let us go to New Market please Let us eat at Park Street today No barrels of sand on donkeys Of all they do are doze and bray Today is the Charlie Chaplin hour Today is the Surabhi 7 'o' clock Today is the slumber of fish and rice Today is the forsaken taxi stand Today if it rains few footsteps will mar
Arup K Chatterjee | p. 35 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Marred potholes of Shyambazar chowrasta If winter, we will look for mustard oil To oil our body in the secret terrace So the tutor will be replaced In the absence of mustard oil All is halting, all time erased Just Sunday tramlines rattle in foil
Arup K Chatterjee | p. 36 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Two Letters and an Octave Baba, There is a photograph I want to show you. I feel very moved when I see it. I imagine you as the man in it. And I feel guilty, overjoyed, and always very moist with many unknown feelings. The photograph is of a rickshaw puller. I took it last month, here at Bhowanipore, as I was crossing the street in Jadubabu Bazar. Ever since it has been printed I felt guilty of the slyness with which I captured this tired labourer. Maybe a portrait of you during your work hours would make me feel the same things. There are so many things about him I do not know. I think it is best that way. I am sending you the photograph, Baba. Lovingly, Sheshank ________
Ammi, Selim is writing this for me. He can write very good Bangla now and also some English. Last night he beat me very much after coming home drunk. I tried to oil the calluses on his feet. He even threw the plate away. There was only starch rice to eat. He brought some money and glass bangles. I wore them. He did not even look at me. Some broke when he crushed my wrist. I worry about tonight. I want to cook something for him. Selim is going to school. He will drop the letter on the way. Ammi, he smiled at me before he picked up the rickshaw handle. I just hope it doesn't rain today. Roads become harsher for his feet. Ayesha. ________
Arup K Chatterjee | p. 37 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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She swept away the last of broken bangles He packed some puffed rice and white onions And tied to the handle of the rickshaw Before he pulled the handle to his waist He looked at her and whispered very softly Do you know how beautiful I think you are? She stared at his calluses, he trotted past A photographer trailing, under grey skies
Arup K Chatterjee | p. 38 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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On the Way Back To Nehru University, New Delhi, in February From interior Bengal to New Delhi A lavish wedding to a railway platform The ceremony is larger hereabouts The food stalls outnumber cousin's marriage The red robes outnumber our wedding aunts As I bend to count the platform footfalls They crisscross like million camera lenses Instead of Brahmins here beggars are fed We call them porters, rather they are Old settlers transporting follies That travellers bring from near and far In cartons, portable strolleys Why do I compare this to a marriage? I am, by far here, the most unwelcome And I wish them away as they wish me And we all tussle for the platform gate And we all will tussle out of this womb Until the stillborns and unborns are left For in every face we can see our sins We have left at the last boarding station Cities will marry cities here Children will come, children go back Coolies will doctor our births clear Our secrecy will cost in black Is it the childhood wind calling again With the evening lullabies of springtime? I will carry my luggage on my own It is difficult to be borne again And harder still to be coming back
Arup K Chatterjee | p. 39 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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To air and sunshine, ageing one more year To remember weddings from every spring To be stranded on stairs as worlds surpass Here to auto stand, hundred miles, A railway engine whistles by I travel, haggle, purloin smiles The suitcase has no alibi
Arup K Chatterjee | p. 40 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Murissa Shalapata
Shalapata, Murissa. “Poems by Murissa Shalapata.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 41-47. Web.
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"Poems by Murissa Shalapata" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Murissa Shalapata | p. 41 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Murissa Shalapata
The Streets A Palazzo, A Bridge, A Prison Dirty metal shackles carved deep within the rough stone I walk the same halls, streets and repent my head as heavy as your every day wrists holding on to the idea of the outside with nothing but memory of bloody Christ drawings So with a sigh you make your own drawings and everything is determinedly carved as if time remembers like stone maybe it is too late to repent with the preparation of the slashing of your wrists the inside becomes your outside when I saw your outside and the patient drawings of the carved and riddled stone it made me want to repent as I massaged my wrists The ache of my wrists when I placed them outside the cobbled drawings in the impeccably carved boxy churches within the stone
Murissa Shalapata | p. 42 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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of your cell where I try to think of the urgency to repent To reach between these gates to repent whittle, like keys, the bones of my wrists to where I can see your bone or my bone on the outside my smaller finger bones run along your drawings like a meditation and they are once again carved and remembered like an ink stone My fingers scratch the imprint you left in chalk stone my forehead, shoulders and chest itch, sigh, to repent but what it felt like to not possess the key to my wrists, and to walk names of the streets outside, elude me like children's drawings not like yours with dates, 1899, all carve
Murissa Shalapata | p. 43 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Visions Of a San Franciscan Chinatown
With stretched out leather Italian sandals in grey I landed on top of Jack Kerouac's name in gold a Hollywood replica in literary memorial a square in cement What better way than with a street sign too? 000--> Jack Kerouac A narrow alley with a neon sign at the end warning (Adler) Margaritas (blocking City Lights) No littering No right turns I shot the scene with a Chinese man who wouldn't budge -that subject challenging author tropehe leaned against the post, hands in his jeans black sunglasses, a cream chapeau and a suitcase by polished shoes It was clear, through the black shade of glass, that he was looking at me looking more Western like an Eastwood
Murissa Shalapata | p. 44 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Reflections Of Venize Friari With crimson Bardolino in hand I taste you, Venize your mind numbing routes of destiny like untangling knots of angel hairs in a hurry by the hour glass of spices that smell of sulfur, basilico, lemon and grass I paid little attention to your streets of uneven marble and stone besides when I tripped and was face to face with my own salty self Ponte Rialto sick of the view sick of the weighty feet that wears her down each year closer to her teal bowels I round and there, stone-faced built-in virgin on the street corner and me - a tourist, an atheist in the thrill of abandonment discovering someone new in me In time Adriatic sun feeds sweat stems down my back growing from my blue floral neck soaking into black cotton
Murissa Shalapata | p. 45 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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At the doors of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari smells like an antique old wood shop in rain kicked a crippled Italiano hunched with a ringing clinging chalice in need of spare jewels from any contemporary Franciscan who's willing to be buried beneath the stone in the floor of the church knowing it doesn’t matter in the end I pass him despite his purple tumors despite his fortune that any icy creature of Cain would trade for my lecture of pictures and stone and men that don't matter any more Nor do I care when in the presence of Canova his tomb of sleep his pyramid of death A sleeping winged lion mourners that you drew (for the death of another) stays guard of our dreams Does the patron let you roam Venize at night? When the flock and exchangelings are away and everything evaporates into the smell of Adriatic
Murissa Shalapata | p. 46 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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at once you know it doesn’t matter in the end
Murissa Shalapata | p. 47 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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C. S. Bhagya
Bhagya, C. S. “Poems by C. S. Bhagya.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 48-54. Web.
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"Poems by C.S. Bhagya" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
C. S. Bhagya | p. 48 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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C.S. Bhagya
December Walk I drift through an ill, ginger-tea winter through a city stammering in cold syllables. I drift through a road taut with absences: people have retreated to parts of the city they believe less desolate, and people who cross despite are split in two directions: some who leave and some who leave. Between this building and that the body lifts in grains, in mist-breath dense steps, the body moves. And on all days that one tree cranes out, barren year-round, head protruding bird like fruit in sharp cries, the aftermath of labour. Now I drift in a subtracting weather. Here dogs practise camouflage, bundling back into limbs in a mess of dead leaf, light
C. S. Bhagya | p. 49 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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wood-debris. Here trees give birth to crows. And here all our close shaves with death become life: sunlight appearing on grave mornings like a hymn – deferral to December’s white logic – to present grace, heal in yellow plaster a year’s broken door.
C. S. Bhagya | p. 50 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Airports In a far corner I glimpse bleach and red aeroplane-fins stab air, parked on giant runways like great fish, some metal whale. They leave a sense of unease in me, airports, with those cool persistent voices on speakers insisting we report suspicious behaviour, objects; think, right about now miscreants in disguise abandoning bombs, and in a second all these lovely, anonymous smooth floors, gaunt ceilings, dishevelled people, babies in trolleys may vanish in one inverted vortex of speed and sound and light. But then you, who I came to see through these doors, marshalled by uniformed men, ushered to customs, immigration and an alien tongue; you, who I trust to the skies with others waiting for distance like flocks of birds, look back and wave through thick glass walls, evening a white glaze in your eye. And your lips form frantic, familiar words soundlessly.
C. S. Bhagya | p. 51 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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The City in The Hills Nose ring aglint, this man arrows through a Mobius strip alleyway in the lowest spill of my city filled with so many people its walls are breaking. In its animal heat, somebody once said, was a lake and in that lake what lies forgotten everywhere. I forget, I say – it’s a little joke of mine – when he hankers for truths nobody cares about anymore in this new land birthed between stray dog dragons, cars spitting fire. Somebody has been feeding him the wrong stories for the right money. It doesn’t matter now if I say I don’t trade in what you are looking for, his sunken stare will crave the gravel of what’s left of the city in the hills he thinks I take great pleasure in hiding from his people running through taverns clutching handbags someone fooled them was leather, books he travelled two thousand miles to read when reading would have led him the same distance away. This man wants the hills from me and will not rest until he has them. So I tell him the lies I always tell.
C. S. Bhagya | p. 52 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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(Once in a city in the hills there was a boy who forgot his name, and what he brought back from the city was a stack of government papers holding his navy blue fingerprint, a passport photo which no longer bears any resemblance to him.) I tell him enough to keep me from trouble: blundering history departments flourish under blind patrons, hoarding what they claim are the real stories: unblemished, deathly pale. I tell him just enough to carry him on the rest of his journey mulling over the wilderness he will later think he came from – a town he will lose sight of in time. I don’t tell him I have an idea of this city in the hills as one imagines the shape of a song one never listened to before. Sixty years is a long time to remember a city somebody told you you were born in, long enough to confuse what it held in its shaky old heart with every city you wanted to visit, with incongruous minarets, canals, crude statues of tribesmen whose chipped shoulders no longer ache of childhood. I don’t tell him I have an idea of this city in the hills, only an idea. I’m making up its streets as I walk along. So I tell him this city lived in a lake once,
C. S. Bhagya | p. 53 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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like the city we’re walking in but the lake has forgotten the city and its people their lake, but they come back insisting they want to listen to its stories telling me, you must be from the city in the hills, you look like you must be from the city in the hills, you have that look, look I’ve come so far to hear of the city the in hills so I may fall in love with my own
C. S. Bhagya | p. 54 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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Editorial Board
EDITOR Arup K Chatterjee Poet, Critic and Researcher Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, India
ASSISTANT EDITOR Amrita Ajay Researcher, and Teacher of English University of Delhi, India
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS K Satchidanandan Poet, and Former Professor of English, University of Calicut Former Editor of Indian Literature, The journal of Sahitya Akademi New Delhi, India Lisa Thatcher Writer Sydney, Australia
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Sudeep Sen Poet, and Editor of Atlas Magazine Editorial Director of Aark Arts Publishers New Delhi, India, London UK GJV Prasad Poet, Novelist, and Critic Professor of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University Vice Chair, Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Editor of Journal of the School of Languages New Delhi, India Sebastien Doubinsky Poet, Novelist, and Critic Researcher, and Lecturer, Aesthetics and Communication Aarhus University, Denmark
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