The Migrating Verse
Photo: Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario
Creative Nonfiction: ‘And then, sometimes—only sometimes—we pull out a stack of old, old handwritten letters with multiple creases, letters exchanged in the past. We touch and re-touch the fragility of being, feeling, and loving too much, all that we once assumed that time couldn’t repair.’
And then, we grow older realizing gradually how… age turns us into a sanctuary: a little secretive, a lot screwed, and a bit resilient. We begin to adopt the silence of a lone post box appointed at the corner of some street. And perhaps sometimes in despair, we look forward to the reasons for the return of something undefined or conflicted, await clearance at 15.15, or maybe expect nothing at all. With this behaviour of time, we peddle love to the duty of caregiving.
We have already understood the autonomy of remaining broken. Having sex has become an occasional obligation for restoring saneness within the wolves in the territory of the phrase… We are in this together.
It takes many, many, Decembers to stay in us, before we learn to interpret missing as half-imagined faces, unused postal stamps, and folded towels.
We enter this episode struggling… almost like hitching a ride, when we come to the awareness that the circumference around our ring finger has already started to believe in the patchwork owned by the ring. The history of touch is the only ordinary thing that stubbornly stays, even after the world has disintegrated and estranged by the virus. In touch, we slowly summarize each other like a script written in Braille. In its revisions… we keep ourselves alive.
And then, sometimes—only sometimes—we pull out a stack of old, old handwritten letters with multiple creases, letters exchanged in the past. We touch and re-touch the fragility of being, feeling, and loving too much, all that we once assumed that time couldn’t repair.
The economy of aloneness grows like a callus… a little late, intimately, selfishly, and immaturely. It makes us escape failure, proclaiming Ami Sukhi. I am happy.
Longing awakes in us. We forget the margins, word counts, and paragraphs. We hold back the feeling of absence inside a glass jar, and put it under the sun to measure a new shape each day as if some sort of cardiology report.
And then, someday… maybe when everything has fallen wintery and cloudy, and maybe when there is less chaos outside the window… we surrender to the DNA that has been conditioned by Tagore for a long time. We pick up the migrating verse to fold one last incomplete song without a closure. “Jawton kore”, with care:
Tobu mone rekho jodi dure jai chole...
Jodi puraton prem dhaka pore jai nobopremojaale -
Jodi thaki kachakachi,
Dekhite na pao chayar moton achi na achi -
Tobu mone rekho...
Yet you must remember me still if I go afar / If old love gets covered under newly found love / Even if I remain nearby but you fail to see my shadow / Yet you must remember me still...
We carry the aloneness to a far, far, city that wears that one tired star like… Baldwin’s mask, covering the disfigured night; and drop inside that lone, lone, post box amidst a crowd of dusty sandals, in the hope that it will reach the address that has only lived by the book.
We remain freckled, compromised… a disproportionate leftover of time.
- Calcutta, December 2023
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Ronald Tuhin D'Rozario lives in Calcutta. He writes stories, poems, and essays. You can find him on Twitter: @RTDRozario.
