pyancha
I give you an owl
her feathers | beak | pupils
are porcelain | everything
is white | I give you a blind
owl the size of a closed fist
you know as I do that in the first
story it is owl and monkey
the exile siblings who float from
sea to sea until they find some
of life’s right things | I know you
have forgotten some details
the bug in the blood box |
the safe clamour of faces
asleep behind glass | I give
you an owl to remind you
of that first story and what
happened to us afterwards –
the places we went | the floors
we kissed | the secrets we thrust
under the foundation sand where
our house stands now where we
have not stood for a while | not
with those dreams intact anyway
this owl is an insomniac
let her repeat to you her blind
tales | leave her by the window
wherever you are | let her
reflect and bring closer some
of the oldest and wildest stars
bok
the crane had a habit of giving out advice | when he had no
listeners he would target widows clad in white at the river bank
on one leg contemplating fishes | the crane said that to outwit
a bear hungry for you the only way to escape was inside a gourd –
you had to carve out a human-shaped hollow and roll to safety inside it
but to outwit a tiger a goat had only to rely on an echo and speak without
bleating | to outwit a king and steal coins from his treasury a bird like
the tailorbird had to find the epiglottis and make sure the king was ticklish
if the trick was successful the king would even have his nose | chopped off
by accident by bird’s design but for a foolproof conspiracy against the rice
stealing thief there were no better compatriots than the wood-apple | the catfish
a barber’s blade and some cow dung | the crane went on making impossible
tales to keep himself engaged | the stories when good lured out fishes from
their depths | the old women who watched his art grow whispered to each other
someday he will inspire the greatest or the longest tale but perhaps he will be
so much in love with himself or another he would have to give up his life
murgi
this is how the story ends – with the old woman lying
down | true I have wrung my word bank dry but why
must the little plant wither her head so | the little plant
shudders | true I wither at the end of your words but how
dare the cow threaten to eat me | the cow kicks a hoof full
of dust on the twilight road | how dare the farmer boy
still not take me home | the farmer boy skips a stone
on grass | it sinks it knows that he has not eaten all day
someone at the farmer boy’s home says | how dare
that banana tree deprive us of plates and humiliated
the banana tree weeps | if only it would rain | eavesdropping
this the frogs agree | we would summon clouds had our tribe
increased | how dare the snake gobble us whole – at this
the krait slinks back to fill his stomach | why ever shall I not eat
What Will Be Glass
We had not fallen asleep, but had we woken up before?
A room so incorrigibly bright that all walls were windows.
Someone laughing outside, neck-deep in winter grass: you
thought that last night’s brain fever sailed in right through
with that laughter. Well, my version is more fiction, less fog.
Or the comfort in darkness. Were we counting clouds, or the
number of evening walkers looking up at clouds? Nothing
beyond our fingers, in any case. Over fields, white bodies of
birds puncturing a less-white sky. A deer, or as usual, endless
dog bark. April’s slow hours stretched out and wrapped around
a sapling’s thin arms. If we are lucky: we will never remember
the same details. A strange belonging – or some strange light.
If You Look Long Enough
No such event: only a lake approaching us
as we bowed down to its water, undeniably wet,
but not as happy as the dogs who come to lap
the shores every day. The lake does not know us yet.
But it allows the sharp blue dragonfly to make tiny grazes
on its surface. Something moves in the dry mass of bramble
on the other side. An animal perhaps, or just the wind.
We make no guesses; it could be either of the two
and nothing would change. The lake turns dark with knowledge,
this we are sure of, a fact, for one of the dogs starts barking.
Fact upon fact, but what else can nourish us? Even as a swan
cuts through the disc that is the sun, the lake gathers itself
around to heal it whole again. Hidden in lies or glorified in truth,
we have come to the point where we will say nothing new. The animal
or the wind stirs. And there, the lake is acknowledging us. Still, no event.
Part of a longer sequence of poems, the content in ‘pyancha’, ‘bok’ and ‘murgi’ has been inspired by two Bangla children’s classics: Tuntunir Boi (1910) by Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury and Thakumar Jhuli (1907) compiled by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar.
This selection, by kind permission, from Sohini Basak’s We Live in the Newness of Small Differences, out July 2018 from Eyewear Publishing.
Sohini Basak grew up in Barrackpore, India. She studied literature and creative writing at the universities of Delhi, Warwick, and East Anglia, where she was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury continuation grant for poetry. She also writes fiction, some of which has appeared in journals such as 3:AM Magazine, Aainanagar, Ambit, Litro, Out of Print, and Visual Verse. We Live in the Newness of Small Differences (Eyewear Publishing, 2018) is her first collection of poetry. It was awarded the inaugural Beverly Series manuscript prize.