Namrata Pathak
​​​Summer 2017

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Guwahati

Day 1
 
Living is an epitaph of cryogenics.
By default you are breathing in, breathing out;
the amount of spores you suck in do not kill you.
The diaphragm of air remains, now that oxygen cylinder
is perhaps not needed.
 
Day 2
 
This city is a firm orb in the sky,
a lie that stretches from this corner to that corner,
some powder and simmer at the ugly nose-ridge,
later, two blobs of wine red on two cheeks.
Faceless faces.And nothing else.
 
Only you have to whitewash your childhood a bit,
search for a home
in small, dry territories
of your mother's forehead.
But here, nobody talks, nobody listens.
You cannot document
the forked pathways and potholes,
ashen hands slitting open
folds of a pregnant evening,
memories pickled by summer-laughs,
limes that store the eyes intact.
Bluish-green, like two marbles.
What is the use?
Here, nobody talks. Nobody listens.
 
Day 3
 
As leaving becomes meeting,
knowing becomes losing,
suddenly you grow roots, webbing the day
memories hang in rhizomes,
This city that is an asylum of silence.
The bread is sour with infection.
This is just another day at work.
 
You draw a semi-circle out of a homecoming,
the feet boils in a rickety rickshaw ride
from the Brahmaputra to Fancy,
the ghats stick out a face, blue-veined,
scaly, familiar, and yet again
death blooms in a stench of fish
and oars in the North.

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On 10th MAY, 2016
(The Fish Woman in your 3BHK)  
 
You can't cook like your mother.
Even though filled with juices,
roasted in medium heat,
the fish is bland. Quiet.
They say, in the kitchen a woman
who barely has eyes and noses dances to life.
A filigree of ivory stories, carved, handmade,
cannot hold her to death.
A fish woman perforates the smoke,
tosses the crumbs of the past with expertise.
Bell pepper. Flakes. More Bell pepper.
The smell hits your nose with an obstinacy.
They say, she has a rose hued touch for living,
for losing,
her crumpled sigh stitches the hills in rough edges,
and you have fish bones for hands again.
As you cut her body she becomes a sign,
like your home. It is there yet not there.
 
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Kaziranga
(Of mangled pronouns: It-He-I)
 
Communities  
of slithering monsters
in Kaziranga,
-heads on branches, hands on roots,
an absence of black, unkempt barbwires,
light, and eyes that haunt-
These are mere frames
in my Nikon DSLR.
 
Here sighs explode
into hundred splinters
of a sunless day
yet its every breath
is winter.
Kaziranga, you inhale
only an innuendo.
 
Because I knew of many kinds of deaths
here,
death counterpointed by thoughts,
of days on edges,
a thirst shoved
down strange throats,
a clock ticking away an infertility,  
an excess, a failure.
Because this is a life of confinement
I have chosen for myself,
because winter is poorer in Kaziranga.
 
I empty my pockets
of stale cigarettes
on marshlands,
on his probings,
double edged, as an evacuation drive
while
light adrift,
an emptiness moves in unison,
aligned,
in a moment
of hundred feet of a centipede.
 
We crawl together
under shrubs, sheets of fog,
wild rhododendrons
to grow resplendently
into a boredom.
 
Next to my body
you are closing in again  
on a mud-crusted
namelessness.
 
That was an ordinary day in Kaziranga.
We part our ways.

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