Mukhamukhi Aspastatat

A lived life on pages

Book title: Mukhamukhi Aspastatat

Author: Kishore Bhattacharjee

Publisher: Koel Prakashan

Price: Rs 75

Pages: 60

Poetry in our time begins to have newer purchase, at least from the practitioners. Kishore Bhattacharjee brings in his lived, imagined, and read life to his pages. It’s a veritable deposition of aspiration and missed dates. The dogged honesty, and equanimity before experience, must strike one as heartening indeed. The redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances. There is also a readiness to welcome what it takes to live almost akin to the farmer’s acceptance of life.

There is, right at the beginning, a sincere endeavour to come to terms with the vexed question of ancestry and genealogy, and a family tree made up of missed dainties on the table, the rites of the prayer room and the gossip in the family lounge, the routine ‘table talk’ without the table. But,

Slowly, they left one by one, to alien climes and places

And my lonely adolescent sky witnessed a gathering

Of dark clouds…

There was a prolonged divorce with the past

And a terrible distance from the present.

Kishore believes and asserts that “there is the promise of abundant crops in the fields of sorrow.” And he can say with confidence that

The undercurrent of memory feeds an abiding longing

For no construct is adequate camouflage for destruction

He wonders if poetry, which is always symbolic, can ever begin to approximate the inherent rhythm of thought. He would rather wish her feelings to thrive in the deep recesses of his darkness. This secure harbouring of feelings and sentiments do not have a long lease of life in our “corporate” existences, for, soon as “language” is referred to, people disdain their body and soul, forget their abiding legacy and readily begin throwing grenades at one another. Kishore then goes on to underline the legitimacy of his wishes and aspirations:

I want to get back my pain, anger, and love

Opening wide my window one night I would feel

The helplessness of those people sprawled

In the yard of the Baneshwar temple,

and our craziness, our vacuity.

Before a single car is on the road

I would paint it and leave

A rose bud at your door.

There are beckoning from across the border but perhaps we have moved too far away. There is quite a journey-work in the poems, both literally and metaphorically, from being lost in Delphi to the courteous familiarity of known faces and the intimacy of a warm cup of coffee. There is also the reassurance of a Karbi saga in the pages jostling with concepts, theories and chance encounters.

All these, however, are leavened by the unenviable but real awareness that in sightseeing tours it is not always possible to go beyond the threshold. But the redeeming feature is that even there you may encounter the warm albeit routinely devout greetings of the night watchman who is an Alzheimer’s patient.

PRADIP ACHARYA

Published on February 10, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120210/jsp/northeast/story_15109223.jsp