SWAPAN SUMARI:::THE CENSUS OF DREAM

8/7/2019 SWAPAN SUMARI:::THE CENSUS OF DREAM

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THE CENSUS OF DREAMS

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Amitabha Dev Choudhury

Translations by Arjun Choudhuri


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Swapna Sumari

A Series of poems in Bengali by

Amitabha Dev Choudhury with translations into English

of the same by Arjun Choudhuri.

2011

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ISBN 978-93-80382-62-3

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THE DREAM PRINCE 12

THE INVISIBLE SIGN

16MALEVOLENT CONNIVANCES 18

AT THE END OF A DELUDED PATH 20

RESTLESS SHADOWS 22

THE DARKNESS OF ENVY 24

YOUR VENOMOUS SMILE 26

CHINA LODGE 28

THE LOST DIARY 30

THE OWNER OF THE RIVER 34

THE HOUSE OF THE MOON 36

HOUSES-YES-AND-NO 38BURHA ALI 40

THE FRAGRANCES OF CHAMPA 42

THE WORLDS OF THE CONGENER 44

UNCLE HUGGER-MUGGER 46

THE SCARECROW 48

THE TENANT 50

THE THIEFS MOTHER 52

THE LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION 54

GOD AND THE LUNATIC 58

THE ESSENCE OF THE COUNT 60.....

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-THE CENSUS OF DREAMS

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FOREWORD

It happens more than often like this.

It happens more than often like this that a person born to become

a politician ends their life as a big shot at a university. A person,who would have been a petty businessman otherwise, becomes

a lumbering scholar of sorts, apparently learned and erudite. A

man who dreamt of becoming a crime detective ends up as a

living corpse that is eternally denied its last sacraments.

It happens more than often like this that a man who wanted to

grow up and write crime fiction ends up labouring his days from

pillar to post as a nose counter beneath the glaring sun and thesearing rain when in every ten years the time comes round for

the great periodical census to begin. And his lengthening, ever-

faceless shadow learns it the hard way that to become a

detectives assistant is not everybodys cup of tea.

Because each human being is an entire story by themselves. Each

human being is actually an endless enigma, a ceaseless mystery.

And because Man in his lifetime is so mysterious, therefore every

corpse is also an eternal mystery.


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I AM THAT DREAM-PRINCE


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THE DREAM PRINCE

When I grow up, I will become the Dream-Prince.

Mark what I say, evening-some jongleur,

you boatmen off the far-off banks of the Barak,

and you who drive on the road now,

heed my words, never in this life shall I touch

that wretched steering wheel.


But then, dont you go a-telling this

to them, its a secret, mind you.

For if you do babble, my lot

will be an unreadable slap on the cheek.

Whats more, my fame as a wastrel will spread,

and the motherless, benighted child that I am,

I will drift away far from the shore.


I shall write murder mysteries.

Such murders they will be that my name

shall spread even into the nether regions.

They will queue up night and day

at this shop with your names, O charioteer of Partha

or at this bookstall named Kamala.

Schoolboys will queue up, as will my friends of now,all ranging around in breeches, only that Gouranga

will be in his trousers; the darkest recesses of his pockets

will now and then yield a battered cigarette or two.

Those stilled screams emanating from the lines in the book

will rush on, towards the softened, singed flesh of the candle

held captive by the sharp edge of the assassins metal weapon.


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And then one day, in one sunburst,

Hashidi the lovely will come down

to buy my books, her braids dripping

with fairy tales, her virginal thighs

sounding a strident challenge

to even the most hardened murderer.

That day, when the lovely Hashidi will buy my books,

I will burst into the Radio Saloon for the first time

and ask for a shave, which will be my first one as well.

The detectives assistant shall, of course, I am sure,

deduce a mystery or two from the beard cast offduring those polished nightly dreams.

And all those dreams I now re-read in these grown days,

I sniff for a whiff or two of those naphthalene scents.

And I find that a certain Dream-Prince yet lives

with his pains and agonies of having not become

the Dream Prince.


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THE INVISIBLE SIGN

The sign is invisible. Only its memories drift near, and nearer still.Hashidis bedroom. The wastepaper basket. And among them all,

a sliver of paper that is still readable: Go to the bower

in the dead of the night. All else was known to the master,

and to the nightly Bombay Mail, two of whose seats lay emptied

that night, till many a station had passed by.

A nameless flower rears its head in amazement

from deep within the roadside crevice on the Silchar-Jowai route .

Its transient smile has been reddened yet more

by the mingled blood of two bodies that nourishes its roots.

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MALEVOLENT CONNIVANCES

When I try to read the pages

that the malevolent fog has almost concealed,

I discover a strange blood stain in the waiting room at Silchar.

But the murderer is steadfast in a Shakespearean dilemma

while the crime reporter keeps a vigil at the news desk

awaiting the hard news of some violent homicide.

The malevolent fog

has no title inscribed onto the cover it creates.But the authors name I manage to decipher somehow,

it is the Dream Prince.


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AT THE END OF A DELUDED PATH

When they say that all paths suffer delusion,there rises a counter argument, that simply says

that there is no path that is actually deluded.

This is what that writer of detective stories thinks,

that writer whose pen has run out of ink,

that writer whose deluded detective,

having indicted the wrong man,

is now on his way to end his life.

That writer has but one course to seek:

Accept his error and discover another way to take.

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RESTLESS SHADOWS

At night when I go off to sleep, my shadowcreeps out through a chink of the closed door.

When I dream of Hashidi, my shadow

kisses her smiling cheeks in the dream.

I wonder who she thinks of, then?

Is it Pranoyda?

But my eyes are more beautiful than his!

I dream of Nasus garden and of the gathering

that is conjured there with our illimitable songs.

My shadow then tears off blossoms

in Nasus garden, peeling off even

the veins of the leaves, leaving me so hapless.

The detective concluded: Do one thing.

Try to dream of only your own shadow,

do dream, but only of a shadow

that is your own and not anybody elses.

Then, and only then will you be ableto confine it within doors. Only then

can you save your own future.


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THE DARKNESS OF ENVY

The man who was killedwas envied by everybody.

Nobody among them

can be distinctly keyed out.

The failed detective

has a sudden thought:

What a wonder is it that

Man has not invented

an instrument to measure

this inimitable darkness!

Even when so much has been

thought and measured out

for the growth of civilisation.

If there had been something like that,

then we would have surely seen light.

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YOUR VENOMOUS SMILE

Your smile drips deadly venom, which is whyfour of your lovers have dropped dead, one by one.

The poet however knows, his sleuthing heart is therefore

fraught with a series of eternal queries, his skies

are covered with birds of carrion in flight.

Poisoned, the smiles in our lives have died, one by one

in the gathering dark. And that is perhaps why,

I remember you, O venomous one, and your questions,

and the agonies of the one whom you never graced

with even a single smile; all of it I do remember.

He could have ornamented you, if he would,

with the fair weight of innocence.


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CHINA LODGE

China Lodge It waits with an air of melancholia

for some murder to happen.

Thirty long years it has been

since it last tasted blood, that was

when it had been young.

But the ownership has not passed,

only a new facade has risen,

concealing the passage of days.

Those wild, repressed streaming nights

come back as memories,

those shivers, those adventures,

those shadowy crawlings

up the stairs to the terrace party.

In the corner there, two shadows

mix and mesh like a dense undergrowth.

The fainthearted Bengali proprietor looks for some promoterbut in vain, since promoters want plots on the road, not inside

this lane within lanes. China Lodge waits endlessly therefore,

its solitary, lonely heart dreaming in the dead of the night

of some secret murderer who has not even been born yet.

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THE LOST DIARY

That diary is lost, and the daily quest for itsettles down, pullulating secret, silent, deep

into another diary, whose every page

keeps playing a blind strain; it is my agony.

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THE CENSUS, BURHA ALI


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THE OWNER OF THE RIVER

The village knows that it will soon happen, the head count.Papers in hand, the baboos will wander from door to door:

What is your name? How many family members here?

You are a farmer? Children? How many bulls for the plough?

What lingo does the mind weep in? What wild cant

do you emit in the termite hour of coitus? And neighbours?

Do they keep any arms? Your parents were they of this country?

Know the barbed wire? Havent you ever silently cursed the gods

when you looked up at the skies? Whose is that boy?

Hope he is not a hermaphrodite or something like that?

Dont hide anything, will you? Or else I might just lose my job.

I would say: I am just the owner of a river or two.

All those stars that float across the rivers surface are mine.

Bulls I have none in the house. Only a wife

whose fate has decreed for her a single meal everyday

besides the regular hunger for the rest of the time.

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THE HOUSE OF THE MOON

Yes, my boy. Its only the two of us, old women, in this house now.People call it the Moons house. There used to be seven sons,

the fiery disease that eats up all insects took them, and since

revenants belaboured them a tad bit too much in the village,

they left, six of them, for distant lands, on the wings of a dream-plane.

Once in six months or so, their wives make calls here, all long-

distance.

If they had been here, the head count would have been full-of-the-

moon, surely.

The father of these six, our only brother he was, would seize his staff

in fury when he heard the mention of America. But then again,

the year Glasnost happened, he left with his eldest son

with a pain in the left of his aged chest; he lives there now.

I hear that his name has an apologetic vote even now during elections.

But the seventh son was lost to the blows of the police.

That girl keeps alive his dream even now, oars in hand.


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HOUSES-YES-AND-NO

In the Yes-House we live, the three of us, my son, my wife and me.In the No-House, it s not three, its not even complete, none

even the house is not so, the mahajan knows himself,

its his hire I live by, labouring my body through half the day.

The rest of the time I am a sharecropper, half of the time,

and the money that is all, is lost in useless toil awry.

Am I a complete man? Or is it that the baboo is half a man?

My son had to leave school, and since a burden of debt

have I gathered, he labours the same way in the same routine.

The son is mine but has not become mine entirely, my wifeworks herself to her death in this household, and that, and that.

So what does it all amount to? How many live in this house?

One-and-a-half and then one-and-a-half again,

I tell you so, my breath and stomach reeking of arrack.

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THE FRAGRANCES OF CHAMPA

Beside the winding fields of grain lies this crushed shed.Alone in this lonely shed waits this cigarette-boy.

Never has he wafted clouds of smoke. Sometimes

he does chew on betel leaves with tobacco or catechu,

when he lifts his Champa onto the carrier of his bicycle

now lying beside him, that wondrous winged steed,

and flies away with the flowing breezes into the far-off skies.

He lives all alone. In the shed does he pass his nights.

For his food, he pays a few bucks to the old lady

whose house lies beyond the fields just there.There, in that house does he bathe and eat and shit.

His mirror hangs alone in that shed.

His cosmetics, daydreams and other things sundry

wait in this shed only. One day when he will become

a householder, he will fashion a hut here, he thinks

a house billowing all around with his Champas fragrances.

Land? None at all. A scooter is much more necessary.

Where else would his willowing Champa hang on if not?

He said, put it down in your papers, two people live

in this shed now, one is the trader here and the other

is the bunch of his dreams which are fragrant like Champa.

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THE WORLDS OF THE CONGENER

A census is not actually a census but a spate of listenings of stories and tales, the one who narrates all this

is quite unknown; he is a stranger who is very familiar.

That voice seems to be my very own voice as all through

the counting I gaze on the stunned visage of the congener.

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UNCLE HUGGER-MUGGER

The maps are dark. Why is there no light on the maps?The foolish census-baboo from the L. P. school sees

the immediate need to visit the eye specialist

in this nightly guttering of the candle. Or else,

this darkness of his will gorge on the maps.

In this maddening night as he tries to draw it all,

why can he not glimpse the faces of those heads

he counted, those three-hundred-and-fifty-strong?

Why does his wretched life spread itself out

over and over again across the maps he draws?

Only Uncle Hugger-Mugger knows, it seems,

why there are so many, so many and yet so many houses,

which become headless ghouls even before the last lines are drawn?


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THE THIEFS MOTHER

How many souls?

These two.

And another one?

There. Asleep.

At this hour?

Because of daily

unearthly hours.

But why?

To fill the stomach.

How?

Wont say.

Whats that

supposed to mean?

The night knows.

And this day?

It passes

with the need to know.


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THE LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION

Descended is Man of hunger, not of language,I lose my argot in the maws of the sirkarwhose breed

grows as they feed, and so do the people too, while

in my household, even salt is a fierce scarcity.

Every decennium, baboo, do come to my house

and walk around, and then write it down how

the Bengali language is not for me, sometimes

it is to be Assamese, at others it is even Hindi.

This nay and aye the worthless poet strings

together in end-rhyme. The tallying of starvation

will never be mine, yet you read on, and on,

apparent tidings of that out aloud for me to hear.

If someday I learn that poets language, it will be

that I shall have learnt the words of that language

as part of my soul, my body; this life thus speeds on,

then and then on, towards a love for the language.

And then also, it might be thus I will have become

some clapped prisoner lonely in gaol, or a cemetery,

being berated by them, being told that the language

I speak would have to be discarded momentarily.

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GOD AND THE LUNATIC

Far off from the census-work,a lunatic sits alone, counting

the moons light on earth.

The moon emerges in a burst

from that moon-struck madcaps eyes.

And so emerges a repressed ego,

for in this hamlet only he knows

the tales of the stigma that God bears.

Therefore, he converses with God all alone,while all the others are devotees, this madcap

liberates God all on his own each day, and

frenzies himself every night with Him

in a delirium that encompasses the firmament.

To the west of the village lies the idol-less temple.

That has been the madcaps secret haven

for so many days now; none approach for fear

of being pelted. The census-workers helpless wait.

They know that they would have to count two

if they would count only him. Democracy too

is incapacitated here, the madcap and God

together create a secret party every night.



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THE ESSENCE OF THE COUNT

O great One, Lord of the road,I weave my paths around you

in this unearthly hour to see

if the productions of men are still

the same going-on. O God,

men pullulate on and on, no road

for them now anymore.

The one infringes on the other,

land, head, shoulders and all.

A remarkable inertia it isthat shrouds this vast noonday.

Such is it, imagine, that the other man

knows even the bloodied sigh

of the post coital moment.

All fences fail. No space, no perimeters.

Therefore observe, in this road and that

how the teeming human habitats grow

without any room for a breather, no road

is now true, Lord, one path meshes itself

into the other, hurriedly, in dire want;

the road, for one, gorges on itself.

Lord of the road, having come here

to work the census, your untimely farewell

I have glimpsed and now it is that I,

leaving aside those wounded, corrupt paths,

those eternal paths wrought by so many feet,

I have climbed onto the highway.

The high ones swarm on the highway.

But you, Lord of the road, are dead.

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SWAPAN SUMARI:::THE CENSUS OF DREAM