The Country and the City
I saw a woman in the queue -
Her sleeve cut out for the scorch,
Her armpit shaved out for the scorch;
Yet the bulge disobeyed the hem
Yet the stubble disobeyed the razor
Brazen. Bronze. Brass. Brash. Blasé.
Like my unapologetic city.
I saw a woman by the country road
Sagged, shrivelled, scalloped, calloused,
Striding home after her roadside ablutions:
The length and breadth of
Her red chequered threadbare wipe,
Distributed with an experienced hand:
One half tousled
Round her washed straggling greys,
To wring out the wetness
That even the sun cannot reach,
The other half
Fanned out across her bosom
Just short of her midriff
Where the worn out yards of cotton
Drape her middle
Just short of her knees.
Yet her curls disobeyed the bind.
Yet her bosom disobeyed the hem.
Bronzed. Unblushing.
Like my countryside
Accustomed to invisibility.
17 April 2019
The Flȃneuse
Flanks of shanties -
Cabinet of curiosities
And nourishings
For eyes and mouths
Levelled
By level means -
In gritty blue tarpaulin
Draped over
Grimy planks of ply
Like the mother’s
Home-weathered
Wraparound of a sari -
Censor and censure
The aesthete
Who dares linger
And gaze higher
For glimpses of
Concrete poetry
That too have weathered time.
It’s for the best perhaps -
This coercion
To look forward
And find new flanks
Up the highway
To build new dreams
In concrete colour.
28 June 2019
Foetal Position
The rickshaw puller
Is fast asleep
Like a pupa,
In his rickety cocoon.
The city is our matriarch
Ever ready
With surrogate cribs
That nestle her toiling fosters -
Pullers, pushers,
Peddlers, porters -
Rehearsing for
The flattened mounting
On the humble hearse.
25 June 2019
Ananya Dutta Gupta has been teaching at the Department of English & Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, for over eighteen years now. In 1999, she was awarded a Felix Scholarship to pursue an M.Phil. in English Literature, 1500-1660 at the University of Oxford. In January 2014, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, awarded her a Ph.D. degree for her dissertation on Renaissance English representations of the city under siege. Her revised Orient Blackswan Annotated edition of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I (2012) is currently in worldwide circulation and she has several other scholarly articles published in national and international journals to her credit. She was Charles Wallace India Trust Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Cambridge, in 2015. She has also published book reviews and translations of essays, poetry and short stories. Her creative non-fiction, travel writing and, more recently, self-illustrated poetry may be found online at Muse India, Rupkatha Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Cafe Dissensus, Caesurae, Pratilipi and Coldnoon Travel Poetics. Her most recent published translation is a short story by Jaya Goiala in Dalit Lekhika, edited by Kalyani Thakur Charal and Sayantan Dasgupta (Kolkata: Stree-Samya, 2020). She has just published a bilingual, illustrated book of anecdotes about childhood titled Abhi Buli: The Diary of a Quipster Boy (Kolkata: Parchment, 2021). Her first book of poems is due any moment now.