Translated from the Bangla by Ketaki Datta
Expiry Date
Each love-affair comes with
a tag of expiry-date!
Before kissing her, go down on your knees,
Twist her body a bit, to read
the alphabets in Braille, with the arcane date,
Inscribed on the pore of each hair on her body,
Dot by dot, on the curve of her arched waist,
Running your eyeless fingers on them.
And again, as you stand up for another kiss,
Mark with keen eyes how the neon-sign
of that latent date
flickers like traffic lights,
In the eyes of your beloved!
Kiss now, like an enraged lunatic,
Fearing an inevitable break-up—
Anytime, just anytime!
Each kiss is a valedictory one!
Each love-affair sports an
Expiry-date on it;
Before planting a kiss, read it,
Feeling it with your blindman’s fingers!
Alien
The robots sit together,
The metro-compartment is dreadfully still!
Rows of lowered heads glued to their cell-phones,
With headphones stuck into their ears,
With the red-blue glow of the phone-screens
Toying on their faces,
Taking after Satan’s searchlight, as though
It’s the deadly beacon of the ‘Blue Whale’ game!
Robot or Alien? None raises his face to the world,
Robot or Alien?
No one lifts his face to the universe.
Who are they standing in front? Friends, women,
exhausted old blokes,
Tamarisk-clump or the waves of the ocean?
Submerged in the ‘virtual’, none pops his mien up
to the world!
Being nonchalant to the sun, the clouds, the grains or love,
staying utterly unconcerned,
Digital mesmerism keeps shaping up the Cyborg,
Human terrain gets effaced, turns obsolete.
In the subterranean train of the evening,
I sit scared, morose,
Array of faces lost in their mobile phones
are all quiet aliens in disguise.
I am alone in their midst, the near-extinct,
last man on earth,
Holding a book of starry verses in my hands,
In whose bosom life’s frothy sea stands concealed!
India Tour of Sherlock Holmes
Numerous dung-cakes line up the wall, look!
Each dung-cake bears the deep imprint of a palm,
Can you see, dear Watson?
This is the only investigating link here,
in this land. Tell me, Watson,
These marvelous wall-script of palm-marks,
nourished by sunlight and excreta,
Each fold of which encapsulates
woebegone Dravidian fingers
of emaciated women,
Could you detect in them any crime, soft-murder,
Sun-incineration with any yardstick,
descended from God,
One by one?
Mad Woman
Quite often, the children on their way back home from school, close in on a mad woman on the road and pester her, saying, “Hey you, mad woman, would you like to have a banana? Hey you, insane lady, would you like to go to Dharmatolla?” The lunatic wench then rushes towards them to retaliate. Immediately, the kids feign to escape like a pack of wild dogs, though they still encircle the victim, altering their strategy. In such a frenzy of irritating the mad woman, the kids pelt her with stones and burst into peals of laughter. This spectacle, no doubt, is an irrefutable proof that human beings are invariably the children of Satan. While returning from office, I rebuke the children, “Hey kids, why are you after her? Do not irritate her, I warn you!” Startled, the children fix me with a stare, in which anger is writ large, as if I have snatched off the prey from their mouth. This moment seems to throw the hardest gauntlet to my personality! They are neither the band of party-cadres surrounding me in front of my house, demanding exorbitant puja-subscription, nor they are the highway hooligans of solitary thoroughfare, during midnight! But they are the dreariest of all, they are schoolboys hemming in an insane woman, I know. If my individuality betrays me a bit at this point, these fierce and violent kids will flock around me as their fresh victim, changing their gameplan. They will tug at my briefcase, hurl pebbles at me and shout in unison, “Hey you, insane, would you like to have a plantain? Hey you, madman, would you like to travel to Dharmatolla?” The stones hurled by them will hurt me, I may get infuriated to fly at them threateningly, they will pose an escape and laugh aloud, noisily, and being circumscribed by them all around, I shall keep losing my mind, slowly, gradually…
Would then the madwoman lift a stone in her hand to avenge in my support?
Ranajit Das [born 1949] is an eminent Bengali poet, a recipient of numerous awards like Birendra Smriti Puraskar, Paschim Banga Bangla Academy Award and Rabindra Puraskar. He has ten volumes of poems, one novel and two books of literary essays. Amader Lajuk Kobita, Ishwarer Chokh, Asamapto Alingan, Sondhyar Pagol are a few noted books of poems by him. A Summer Nightmare and Other Poems is a book of his translated poems, published by Rupa and Co. in 2011. In 2012, he represented India in the Literary Festival in Croatia.
Ketaki Datta is an Associate Professor of English with W.B.E.S. She is a novelist, short story writer, poet, translator, editor and reviewer. She has two novels to her credit, A Bird Alone (2008) and One Year for Mourning (2014). Her translated novels are: Shesh Namaskar: The Last Salute (2013), Jarasandha’s Paadi: The Voyage (2009), Selected Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore in Translation (2015), Kumarsambhab and Sakuntala in Pracin Sahitya (2017), Nineteenth Century Women’s Writing and Writing for Women in Translation (2015). Her translated stories were published in Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), Pratibha India, anthologies like Three Stories by Tapan Bandyopadhyay(2012). Oral Stories of the Totos by her has been recently published by Sahitya Akademi (2021). Somewhere Beyond, Someplace Else: A Book of Travel Essays (2021) originally by Shyamali Bhadra was published by Ananda Publishers. Literature in Translation (2014) has been edited by her. Stalks of Lotus contains a translated story by her. The Value of Woman originally by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay has been launched this year in the Kolkata Book Fair. Three of her translated stories are in press, two with Orient Blackswan and one with Niyogi Books. In 2024, Black Eagle Books has published her translation of Dhruvaputra, a Sahitya-Award winning novel, originally written by Amar Mitra in Bengali.