To Chitra
Oh river of my childhood!
Once flowing through Narail town around Jessore,
Now only a fading facade in my dimming memory.
I grow old, I grow old...
Yet I can still hear your dark layers imploring,
Happy vegetation and happy habitat for so many living.
I grow old, I grow old...
Those rabid riots had appropriated other spaces;
Today they flicker only as voices of sabotage
Not merely in my town or once happy home,
They now to me are useless, redundant heap of tattered images.
I could lose my home, could lose my own, but never lost you.
Would run, if possible, to your deep dark waters again that gurgle in my inner ears.
But I grow old, grow old...
I have lost you from sight but never from my soul.
Sans shelter, sans food...
My dreams still retain you as my reality,
Oh! the river of my childhood,
You no more flow outside or gush gorgeously,
You are now within,
All enveloped in the mindscape of my ageing self.
Here water flows only in broken PVC pipes,
And rivers here only churn soots of despair;
Your deep chasms by contrast flow, flow and flow.
I had stood for hours during my pre teen years,
Waiting to catch a glimpse of that jubilant rohu, tangy tangra or grumpy kaalbosh
Gasp out from your dark abyss;
You gushed across the verdorous gloom of Jessore district.
You also saw how the line of residents hopeless and scarred,
Cross your banks to join the crowd near Benapol.
So many years have passed now, so many eclipses,
But within the deep chasm of my uprooted,
Partitioned, ousted mind space,
You are there-a living reality.
Though lost in a distant topography now unseen, unheard to me,
You perpetually pulsate there within and flow to eternity.
Address@ Colony
Jabardakhal or occupied space
Locales are multiple
Gandhi nagar, Ashutosh colony,
Sucheta Colony, Katju Nagar or the Martyr’s colony
From sunrise to sun down
They chirp with urban clamours
Rabindrasangeet coexist here
With impromptu nursery rhymes
“Amra refoogee,
Amra refoogeeder chelemeye
Amra refoogee…"
Four square meals are a luxury here
Amidst sloth, disease and stagnation
The sun never enter the windows
They are waiting stations
Where trains never arrive…