Home and Exile: Two Poems by Ajanta Paul
Photo: Karan Madhok
Poetry: ‘If Bangla is the resonance / of raindrops on the soul / English is the petrichor / of poetry that emanates from / the rain-moistened earth / of my being.’
Bed No. 102
As Bed No. 102 you are
a wraithlike figure in light blue
pants and shirt, all those years
of activity and usefulness
that you took as your life
having wasted away
to a gaunt frame
of bodily references.
You are an official statistic
on a cold, impersonal computer screen
whose only claim to distinction is her
dietary option: veg, diabetic, low fat.
You are a mass of medical jargon,
of tests, reports, prognosis, an object
of pitying looks of curious visitors,
floating phosphorescence in the healthcare sea.
Where is that self you have
left behind amongst a plethora
of faces, each as real as the other?
The xray plates reflect the
transparencies of your inner truth.
In the half-glow of the night lamp
you know you are not the personae
attributed to you
but a wild spirit haunting
the antiseptic corridors of a fraying fable.
*
Home and Exile
My language is both my home
and exile. There is my state
to which I owe regional allegiance.
Its culture, my habit,
its custom wound
around my body, its taste
smeared on my tongue,
its syllables, the croonings
of my lullabies.
Later I discovered another realm.
Through imagination I contracted
another relationship. It stretched
into the vowels of another love,
another lore, another lexicon
of loneliness beyond words,
memories of moods
that marinated in my marrow,
carousings of a mature dalliance,
sometimes a tropical paradise
luxuriant with foliage of expression,
at others, a grey, woollen cap of images
on a far flung, fog laden isle.
English is my home and exile,
Bangla, my ancestral birthplace.
English ripples with tenses
of immediacy, discovery, and sustenance;
Bangla susurrates with the nostalgia
of primal rivers in my veins.
If Bangla is the resonance
of raindrops on the soul
English is the petrichor
of poetry that emanates from
the rain-moistened earth
of my being.
Between the two lie the seas
where I navigate impulses
in the blood, where I get lost
amongst affiliations and destinations,
and waylaid by temptations
in ragas of different intonations,
and where, sometimes, I hit the shore
in the dawn’s effulgent glow.
***
Dr Ajanta Paul is a poet, short story writer and literary critic. She is currently Principal at Women's Christian College, Kolkata, India. A Pushcart nominee, Ajanta has been published in literary journals including Spadina Literary Review, The Pangolin Review, Offcourse, Atticus, The Statesman, The Bombay Review, The Wild Word, Verse-Virtual, Setu, Kitaab, The Punch Magazine, The Critical Flame, Kavya Bharati and Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
