Speech

 

Calcutta/Bangalore

 

The conductor looks away as I come

closer to his moving ground, ribbed with wood

very few are remaining in this bus now

for instance, the driver, and him and I

he presses the beedi en route to his chest

and stifles a story I do not ask

we must behave as strangers in this poem

otherwise what are zebra crossings for?

 

This is a road that steels recognition

maybe it is too recognizable

that I cannot ever tell where it belongs

to this or that city, this or that home

sometimes ease and familiarity

quietly preserved in the sunshine colour

are found not in language but price of things

you just need to buy them from time to time.

 

In buses here they use metal flooring

bigger wheels, also, a no smoking board;

the conductor stares at me as I come

closer to loving this scrutiny, and

trying to smuggle fragments of his speech

into memory of a sea of voices.

I pretend I am not a stranger here,

as he pretends to be stranger than is.

 

…plus, I do not mind the names on these shops

even in my language they were just arrows,

unpronounceable signs to where I willed,

wherever at all for thoughts to wander

so, I just created my own meanings

both, for names I understood, or did not

until someone said that my meanings were

pointlessly wrestling in his dizzy head.

 

“Electronic City, saar,” I get down

like ten years ago, but in a different city;

ten years ago there was nothing new

in this act of skidding up and down,

like words dawdling in a traffic jam…

At the zebra crossing there was someone like me,

I should have helped in my mother tongue,

but, I went my way without interfering

the revenge of a language on another.

Arup K Chatterjee is Asst. Prof. of English at University of Delhi. He is a PhD scholar at the Centre for English Studies, Jawharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the founder/editor of Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing). He is recipient of Charles Wallace fellowship, 2014-15, to UK.

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