Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Dec '11, 1.2)

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)

(ONLINE ISSN 2278-9650 | PRINT ISSN 2278-9642)

NO. 2 | DEC ‘11 | 1.2

ED. ARUP K CHATTERJEE

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

(INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

(INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)

ISSUE II | DEC ‘11 | 1.2

ED. ARUP K CHATTERJEE

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)

Coldnoon envisions travel not as flux but instead as gaps in travelling itself. Coldnoon means a shadowed instant in time when the inertia of motion of images, thoughts and spectacles, comes to rest upon a still and cold moment. Our travels are not of trade and imagining communities; they are towards the reporting of purposeless and unselfconscious narratives the human mind experiences when left in a vacuum between terminals of travel.

First published in New Delhi India in 2011

Online ISSN 2278-9650 | Print ISSN 2278-9650

Cover Photograph, Arup K Chatterjee

Cover Design, Arup K Chatterjee

Typeset in Arno Pro & Trajan Pro

Editor, Arup K Chatterjee

Assistant Editor, Amrita Ajay

Contributing Editors: Sebastien Doubinsky, Lisa Thatcher, G.J.V. Prasad, Sudeep Sen,

K. Satchidanandan

Copyright © Coldnoon 2011. Individual Works © Authors 2011.

No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or copied

for commercial use, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent

acquirer. All rights belong to the individual authors, and photographer.

Licensed Under:

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License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.

http://www.coldnoon.com/copyright/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Dec’11/1.2.html

Jawaharlal Nehru University

New Delhi 110067 India

www.coldnoon.com

Contents

Introduction

Editorial

Brian Wrixon

Amit Ranjan

Mohan Rana

Manash Bhattacharjee

Arup K Chatterjee

Murissa Shalapata

C. S. Bhagya

Editorial Board

1

7

11

16

22

27

32

41

48

55

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING Dec ‘11, No. 1.2 | www.coldnoon.com

Introduction | p. 1 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)

Introduction

by Arup K Chatterjee

Chatterjee Arup K. “Introduction.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 1-6. Web.

Licensed Under:

"Introduction" (by Arup K Chatterjee) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under

a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.




Introduction

Perhaps Coldnoon needs to be redefined. It is true that “travel” immediately

implies to many people either travelling over a great distance on official or

leisurely matters, or a travel across years and ages. While the first one is based

on the dictionary meaning of “travel” the second one is idiomatic, and there

are a few more dictionary and idiomatic meanings of “travel” as well. Coldnoon

was born to highlight those other meanings, alongside the obvious ones. For

instance, the “walk” or the “bicycle ride” or the “newspaper” or the “letter”

needs to be re-examined. Either they are so common examples of travel that

the word “travel” excludes them today in its signification, or they are so

forgotten like the spokes of the cycle of the florist who delivers the bouquet to

your beloved that the delivery matters more than the subject which covers

instead the spokes. But, whatever the subject be, no exclusion of its meanings

are intended to be made, although Coldnoon does incline towards certain

fundamental aspects related to travel, and more importantly, the watcher of

travel, upon a cold spot, one who is presently resting between terminals of

travel. With so much, I dedicate this issue to two very old aspects of travel –

the walk and the railways.

The main reason for the expansion of and misunderstandings caused by

a word is technology which unites many usages many languages many customs

and generations. We are not always able to grasp the multifarious utility of

things that come as new or unvisited by us. So, we take on meanings that may

be different from the ones who took before or after us. In Brian Wrixon’s poem

“Remembering” technology slows down the pace of the travels of a father and

son from a running pace to a reminiscing walk. In “In Darkness, Light” Wrixon

blends two historical moments – one of Edison’s demonstration of the first

commercial incandescent light in one evening of 1879 at Menlo Park, New

York City that thousands flocked to see, and two of Neil Armstrong’s

exclamation on landing on the moon: “(O)ne small step for man, one giant

leap for mankind – and transforms it into a case of the latter existing without



the former. The moonlit walks of new lovers, new neighbours and new friends,

all descendants of the first bulb-watchers, now in the absence of power

electricity becomes a “giant leap” again. The moon was always there, electricity

was later. Similarly travel and the railways were only to be followed by the

telephone. Ironically it is the “The Telephone Box” on an English hillside that

makes Wrixon’s poet persona construct a journey that has been recently made

and with its undertakers he can communicate only through telepathy today.

Such is the obviating nature of telecommunications that lived journeys fade

into oblivion.

Travel induces some incompleteness, that is true. Travel is never

finished, the desire is handed down again and again – it is a present

continuous, a gerundic force. Amit Ranjan’s “Standard Three” brings us back

to the root of this motion, the gerund. The secrecy of an unmoving spot which

is the parking lot, in this case, becomes an indelible moment of pause in a

child’s growth. An uncle took the child to a corner and a “little puppy kept

barking” without our knowledge of what really happened. A new gerund had

begun, for in that tender age “gerunds came free”. And these gerunds once

begun keep spinning on their own, keep driving the traveller without whose

knowing whence, whither and why. Likewise, in Ranjan’s “Villanelle of

Sardana” the traveller is advised by the “cold marble statue” at the historical

Catholic Church to “search for what he must search”. And, so, the travel takes

on a new meaning altogether; the poem as Ranjan cautions has nothing to with

the history of of Sardana or Begum Samru, or details that generally draw a

tourist to a historical spot. Shaking us out of the touristic complacency is also

Ranjan’s apocalyptic perception of the railway which all other poets in this

issue use as an image of adolescence or of the idyllic. Ranjan surprises with his

jarring staccatos on the “Parallel Lines” which I reckon as even a travesty of the

national anthem of the nation to which it belongs. Like Rabindranath Tagore’s

song Ranjan enumerates travels (and travails) throughout the length and

breadth of India experienced by its population in the train. “We owe it (all) to

the parallel lines”. One may suspect that our national anthem owes something

as well.

Mohan Rana remembers the years he has come by over his “Philips

Radio”. The radio has taken him past time and distance. He had never known

the maker of this vehicle; he did not know where it came from. But now as he



stands in Eindhoven near the building of Philips Corporation he wonders if it

was the same radio that took him and so many like him so far. But meanings of

the radio do not still cohere. They do not cohere because what was so distant

has now become close like the “nearby sky” from Rana’s “Roads, Black &

White”, and that which was everyday and near to the traveller like the

anonymous streets and the staple of “sookhi rotis and three ‘o’ clock dal fries”

have now acquired a mythical proportion. Telecommunications have made

the world so rapid that after a day wrought with the “din” of hectic motion we

arrive at the red signal of “Journeys” to find an auto-rickshaw driver

disappointed at the red colour of his teeth seen in the chaotic rear lens mirror.

Unless it is green and back to motion the world will stay appalled. But how

much can one travel? How much can one be curious about? In “Circling and

Identity” Rana imagines that travel has been and will be about two very

fundamental curiosities – the within and the without. The traveller itself has

become the fulcrum around which one travels inward and outward; going

round about in a circle. I need, however, remind you all that Mohan Rana’s

poems have been translated from Hindi. Therefore, the elements and

interpretations of travel seen in his poems and in this introduction have

already travelled a good distance from their origin, gathering a plethora of new

meanings.

Every moment of travel is a double stroke. Manash Bhattacharjee would

try to extend it to three strokes if I allowed him. According to him a travel is

both lost in time, as well as (represented) away from its historical time. The

third stroke in the moment comes when we perceive the traces of the others

who have travelled the same road or “The Same Street”, using the title of

Bhattacharjee’s poem itself. “The Same Street”, as the poet says, was “not your

street”. It did not belong to him or her or to anyone, not even the traveller. In

the end we meet a mysterious man who in his previous birth “was either born a

toad or a peacock”, which is why he loiters about in the rainfall. Like Fahim

and Pooja had left their love-story on the stones in “At Hauz Khas Ruins” this

mysterious man (who is in fact poet Amit Ranjan; Coldnoon is delighted to

bring together these two poets) leaves his trace in a natural phenomenon, the

rainfall. So, when the stones at Hauz Khas are revisited the lovers will come

back to haunt, and when it rains on the same street this mysterious man will

return.



My poems continue from where I had left them in the last issue, in a

series of travel poems that form part of a larger structure namely “Hundred

Miles Around Dacres Lane”. Dacres Lane is in Calcutta, and hundred miles is

mythical. So the poems are set almost everywhere in the places I have been. In

this issue, three of them feature Calcutta and the last one is about a journey

back to New Delhi from West Bengal. “On Revisiting Tollygunge Cemetery”

is a reconciliation between existing reality and the solipsistic walks of a fanciful

childhood. The child persona often both fancies and fears another community,

quite simultaneously. This combined with contemplative walks around relics

of that community produces ludicrous childhood imaginations that one

cannot easily outlive. However, it is not devoid of the growth of spiritual

difference and eventually spiritual oneness with the inanimate and sentient,

alike. “Rear Window Crimes” (a title borrowed from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear

Window) presents a usual Sunday freezing of time in a metropolis which is so

used to motion and chaos that cracks seem to appear in typical middle class

family, when travel stops, as seen by a rear window voyeur. Travel mollifies

these cracks, travel is all-subsuming, it subsumes the secret and the personal, as

does the spectacle of a rickshaw puller carrying a vestigial mode of transport in

his hands so that voyeurism gets drawn more and more to this surface veneer

and led farther from the private story. Finally, “On the Way Back to Nehru

University, New Delhi, in February” relates the unfounded or the unknown

guilt of a returning traveller who escapes from one scene of crime to another,

always at unease. Travelling and leaving things behind reminds of a primal sin

that precedes birth.

“The Streets: A Palazzo, A Bridge, A Prison” by Murissa Shalapata

manages to exorcises this guilt in no longer remaining the uneasy criminal but

initiating a unison with the criminals of the past, and the traces they have left in

a Venetian Prison, across the Bridge of Sighs near Palazzo del Doge, in Italy. In

“Visions of a San Franciscan Chinatown” Shalapata takes us to Chinatown on

her way to finding the iconic bookstore called “City Lights”, after being

inspired by Beatniks and Jack Kerouac. However, her attention shifts to a

street sign dedicated to Kerouac, his name cemented in English and Chinese,

owing to the blinding neon signs belonging to one Margarita Bar. Thus, once

again a journey takes an alter-life of its own deviating from the purpose with

which it had been started. Shalapata tells me in a personal conversation that



the Friari Church in her poem “Reflections of Venize: Friari” is her favourite

church not only for aesthetic reasons (Shalapata is also a student in Art

History), but for the number of artists who have left their paintings as their

traces. Three strokes come full circle again and Shalapata does not

sentimentalize.

When the flock and exchangelings are away

and everything evaporates into the smell of Adriatic

at once you know

it doesn’t matter in the end (“Reflections of Venize: Friari”)

C. S Bhagya begins her “December Walk” with startling emphases on

“drifting”. The traveller has lost agency somewhat. She travels almost with the

sense of what is to come, but what is just in a deferral, like people, “some who

leave and some who leave”, like “this building and that”, like the dying year

making dead leaves out of camouflaging dogs. In the end the year is just a

“broken door” leading to another, or deferring another. “December’s white

logic” and the winter snows are themselves a deferral to their own coming.

What comes before, the “yellow plaster” of summer sunshine or the “grace” of

Jesus Christ, we will never know. In “Airports” Bhagya reveals that a journey

intended as a rendezvous with the airplane has instead become a kaleidoscope

of visions and voices at the airport. The flight will be covered in a flash now,

but what has just been encountered at the airport has left its undying imprints.

It is like seeking an unknowing helper to help her into the knowledge of space

and travel, a helper that has to be “marshaled by uniformed men”. By the time

she can come to “The City in the Hills” she finds she herself has become the

helper and the companion. People mistake her for someone from the mythical

city in the hills; people who have forgotten the city and their belongings

therein but identify her as someone who knows about their long lost roots. She

does not disappoint them; she makes fictions of this city. It is as though owing

to the curiosity of another she has gone far into knowing this city only too well.

It is time therefore that the traveller must return to fall in love with one’s own

place of being.


Editorial | p. 7 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)

Editorial

Chatterjee, Arup K. “Editorial.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 7-10. Web.

Licensed Under:

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.




Editorial

Dear Readers

Of Coldnoon,

Readers cannot be driven. Reading itself is a static act. But many readers will

argue that they travel new worlds through reading. This means travelling to a

new world empowers. Reading is also considered privileged. So, only the

privileged have the leisure or means to read, and reading privileges them too.

Therefore, in the mind or in the body, the subject is always at travel, and

needless to say, not without some privileging brownie points one gathers along

the way.

When we began Coldnoon we had no intention of empowering readers,

or privileging some over others. It has occurred to me, with the receipt of some

educated criticism from readers, that Coldnoon has underprivileged those who

came to read with the purpose of sight-seeing. To them I apologize.

Purposelessness has been root of Coldnoon; purposelessness in travel our sole

purpose. Writers ramble without knowing to write, readers gobble words

sometimes without referring to dictionaries, the Coldnoon; writers travel

maplessly. These are travels to which we have been thrust into, without

knowing, without caring, without living or dying because of them. Definitely a

holiday, an exploration features here and there but the moot understanding of

travel in this poetry seeps from the incoherence of the innumerable objects,

symbols and signs of travel that we leave everyday behind. We take the

pavement, we look for our bus. We find it, and we are off. Something happens

in the family, something good or bad; a friend breaks trust or delights us and

we are sedated or excited. We turn quiet or start observing. There is a sense of

our stopping, having made a time period for ourselves. It is as if we are

overtaken suddenly with all those objects, symbols and signs we had been

leaving behind so far. So now appear those numbers of the buses with a greater

vitality. Now the ticket counter of the metro starts mattering too much. And



now we are playing those games in our heads of measuring the inertias of

motion of train compartments. Say, for instance “which bogey will stop near

me, will the door stop in front of me?” And, so on.

From the time we step out to the time we are back we have encountered

at least one thousand traces of someone travelling, someone who travelled or

someone who will travel – a phone call to a travel agency, a fine-slip for driving

without papers, a decision between the main road and subway, in fact the

courier that was mailed to our names. Imagine the distance even our names

have traversed. These all are incoherent, because our coherence is a product of

them.

Some people like travelling so much that they travel imaginarily when

they cannot act it out. Their fancy starts impersonating their bodies. This

question has been asked frequently: why does not Coldnoon; have poems

describing imaginary travels? The answer is Coldnoon; is not eventually about

travel as much as it is about the locatedness of the traveller at a termination of

the travelling act. The significance of Coldnoon; is in that cold and terminal

moment when the perspiration of the traveller cools off and discordant images

prism into a kaleidoscope. It is about the tired or the waiting traveller; it is

about the planning and the return, about expectation and reportage. Whatever

we write has already been. Even if the time is a fictitious time to come at least

the writer has seen this time. So, it is already past. Therefore we can only write

of things after we are through with them. In this regard the Coldnoon; travels

are imaginative; they are of mixed experiences from mixed travels. The

element of fiction is never ruled out, as it ought not to be. But idea of creating a

space or a comfort zone is separate from the idea of the “Coldnoon;” that

creates a space of its own around the resting traveller. This rules out the

purpose of space itself and induces a contingency of space. Our travel poetry is

about relating to this contingency with negative capability. In this way we are

not writers of imaginary travel or leisure travels.

Let me leave you all with a legend. Once a young prince asked a hermit,

“what do you mean by travelling in the mind?” The hermit answered, “I create

new worlds with divine knowledge and I walk past them in my imagination”.

The prince said, “Your mind travels but your body does not. How strange!

When my body travels my mind does not. If the mind does not travel is the

travel futile?” The hermit replied, “O young prince that is because only my



mind has seen these worlds that I tread past every day. It is the task of my

mind, therefore, to show the way to my body. The body is fanciful and

ephemeral, it will not last. So I do not exert it”.

The young prince grew thoughtful. The princely blood in him revolted

against the spiritual jiujutsu of the hermit. He was not convinced at all. To

remain that way and not react would mean he had bowed before an

unemployed beggar. After a while he spoke, “I have seen the elephants tire.

They do not have a mind as ours. I have seen leaves fall, and thorns dispersed.

They probably have no mind at all. We travel much more than these creatures

ever will. But they travel the entire world they have known. What finds their

way for them? What mind tells them to travel? You speak as if your mind came

first, the world was next and then you travelled. The elephant goes to the same

stream every day. The thorny seeds do not cross our territory. Neither do you,

but you have already travelled the world. When my body tires the travels of

these insignificant livers come clear in my mind. How do you come to know of

them, you who claim to know the universal relation in all sentient beings? If

your body does not travel, it does not tire. If it does not tire how does your

mind remember what it saw? Answer me? The hermit was silent. The king had

been overhearing the conversation for some time now. He came forward and

greeted the hermit; both of them smiled as they were impressed by the

precocious prince’s rhetoric. The hermit offered his blessings to the prince and

the king rewarded the hermit for introducing his son to such an interesting

problem.

However, after that day, the hermit was not seen in the state anymore.

The legend has that he left the country for a world tour with the reward he had

received from the King.

Happy Coldnoon to all.


Brian Wrixon | p. 11 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)

Brian Wrixon

Wrixon, Brian. “Poems by Brian Wrixon.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 11-15.

Web.

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Brian Wrixon

Remembering

Rolling meadow down our street

Father, son run bare feet

Happily discovering

Butterflies, baby birds, wings

Seeds, bugs, nature's things

Quietly amazed

Then noise

Chainsaw, hammer, bricks, stone

A single tree left all alone

Progress?

Nature killed, meadow gone

Father and son have walked on

Only remembering



The Pathway

In the dappled sun beneath the trees

A well-worn pathway leads me on

In a forest cooled by the breeze

A robin greets me with its song

I know not where the path will lead me

I am content to walk along its length

For one who lives both happy and free

It is the journey itself that gives him strength



In Darkness, Light

The growing stillness of a summer's night

The music of birds singing, cicadas buzzing

Neighbours together, walking, talking

The music of people with people

Wafting over the stillness of a summer's night

Enjoying the darkness

A blaze of candles, the glow of oil lamps

Food being cooked on open flames

New friends laughing, sharing, singing

Failure of the power grid

Creating new light on a summer's night

One giant leap for mankind



The Telephone Box

I sit on an English hillside

A village lost in time spread below

A peaceful pastoral setting

I dream and my mind wanders –

I can see the mail coach arriving

It stops at the village inn

Ladies in bonnets and men with walking sticks

Stepping down from the carriage

The anxious team ready to press onward –

I blink and am brought back to the present

As I spy the red call box on the edge of town


Amit Ranjan | p. 16 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)

Amit Ranjan

Ranjan, Amit. “Poems by Amit Ranjan.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 16-21.

Web.

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Amit Ranjan

Standard Three

I was in standard three

I thought the gerunds came free

I was playing in the park

An uncle took me to the parking

My little puppy kept barking.



Parallel Lines

In father’s words they were

The lines that run to meet

And the lines that never meet.

And perhaps their value lies in that.

While Nehru made a ‘tryst’ at midnight,

Millions made a tearful, silent flight,

A flight across a line on paper.

A crooked line cooked up by crooked ambitions.

Parched, Homeless, terrorized, dead and alive,

Clustered like a million buffaloes for sacrifice,

They undertook the journey across the line

On an engine running on parallel lines.

It was spring-time,

Yet a fifty people were charred

In a burning train at Godhra,

On the same parallel lines.

“Spring is the mischief in me”,

Said a ‘moody’ Gujarat

And burnt on parallel lines.

The bare buttocks of Ghaziabad

And the metro-rail of Shahdara

Are strewn along the parallel lines.

The tunnels of the raining Western Ghats,

And the hills of the snowing Simla,

And the swirling sands of Bikaner,

Are all penetrated by the parallel lines.

The eunuchs calling you Shah Rukh Khan,

The grimy girls singing for a rupee,



The chant of ‘Chaiya-Chaiya’ for tea

The beggars with less than four limbs;

The man getting his boot polished

And spitting on the floor-

They all travel on the parallel lines.

The vast, endless, fallow plains

The incessant, enchanting August rains,

The 44-degree boiling train,

The freezing half-naked bodies shivering in cold pain,

The rivers meandering like an endless snake,

The summits that never meet,

They are all witnessed by the parallel lines.

They burst a bomb in the desert

And had a dessert in Delhi,

And strew the sand

In a ‘Gaurav Yatra’

Along the parallel lines.

There is on the parallel lines

A name with two languages-‘Dehri-on-Sone’.

One of the lines was made weak;

And one night

The blue Rajdhani

Fell into the red sand of Sone

Off the parallel lines.

Lal Bahadur resigned on one

Nitish and Paswan could resign on none.

All the fun

Is seen by the indifferent parallel lines.

Twenty-eight states,

A hundred religions,

Ten thousand castes,



Three classes,

A thousand dialects,

Are woven together

By the parallel lines

If there is a nerve of this nation,

(that has not cracked as yet)

It is the ‘parallel lines’.

Oil, fish and coal

And a billion whole

Traverse a million miles

And owe it to the parallel lines.



Villanelle of Sardana

He wandered off to, and then off an old church

In search of someone's mango grove

The sweltering heat would leave him in a lurch.

On a green canopy, an exhausted eagle’s perch:

Through the air burning on a fiery stove

It looked as if it was the end of the search.

The eagle says, 'I’ll sing a dirge'

A dirge of timeless, mighty love

He says, 'sing a ballad, I urge'.

The eagle says, 'the skies and the earth merge

When over hills and rills all day I rove,

How does it matter if it's a ballad or a dirge?

Like the meandering smoke, you need to surge,

Or may be like the breath of the clove,

With the heat of the air, you'll have to merge'

He goes back to the old church

Bows his head in mighty god's love

And asks a white cold marble statue to search

Search for what he must search.

Sardana is famous for the first Catholic Church in North India made by Begum

Samru. Begum Samroo was originally Zebunissa. Walter Reinhardt ‘Sombre’ fell in

love with her when she was 14 and he 41. ‘Sombre’ was his nickname based on his

perpetual sombre mood. ‘Samru’ is a corruption of ‘Sombre’. Sombre was a

mercenary fighter and rose to own the Sardana principality near Meerut. After his

death, the Begum inherited the throne, and at a point of time her army was

virtually the savior of the Mughal dynasty in decay. Tees Hazari is so called because

30,000 Sikh soldiers had camped in Delhi to overthrow Shah Alam. The Begum’s

army drove them away. The poem has nothing to do with all this.


Mohan Rana | p. 22 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)

Mohan Rana

Rana, Mohan. “Poems by Mohan Rana.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 22-26.

Web.

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Mohan Rana

Philips Radio

My home grew wizened on its Vivid Bharati

Its highs and lows, the fluctuating waves

Its knob has forsaken us in our last whitewash

Cells heated in the sun turn silent by nightfall

In between the headlines

Cowering from the rough wind in the open streets, at the heart of Eindhoven

I stand near a large building of Philips Corporation

I walk the zebra-crossing ponderingly

Is it our Philips Radio

Translated From the Hindi Poem “Philips ka Radio”

From Is Chhor Par, 2003



Roads, Black & White

Traversing cities, addresses and nameless corners

Turning to the left and turning right

For miles into the horizon plunging

Spiralling often or sloping down

Endless forever these twin-born roads

The long-bound nocturnal buses,

Dhabas, sookhi rotis and three ‘o’ clock dal fries

Farms left behind somewhere in darkness

The cool scent of Vanaspati

And somewhere a dozing scarecrow

Beneath the constellations of a nearby sky

Translated From the Hindi Poem “Safed Sadak, Kali Sadak”

From Subah Ki Dak, 2002



Journey

Smoke crosses the bridge

A river ambles in melancholia

A coal-laden truck passes the check-post

Power-plant chimneys breathe colour into the Autumn sky

The evening’s newspaper is wrapped in a din

In a din an elephant goes to its bath

Journeys get arrested in this din

By the din in his rear-lens the rickshaw driver observes

His teeth that are red

At a red-signal

When will it be green, I wonder

Translated From The Hindi Poem “Yatayat”

From Subah Ki Dak, 2002



Circling An Identity

Let us see who lives in this house

The hope of some surprise

Stands patiently with folded arms

Knocking on the door I wonder

How ancient this door must be

I listen to the breeze disentangling from shrubs,

The resonating traffic seeping through their pores

I listen to my breath, my rising pulse

And wiping my shoes on the doormat

I plant my ear on the door

It felt someone was approaching from within

Closing my eyes, expecting

A hand inside to motion, reach out for the bolt

As if the eternal sigh spread over the momentous spot

Both on inside

And without

As if I myself, the door perhaps

Ever estranging

And becoming

an Identity

Translated From the Hindi Poem “Ajnabi Banta Pehchaan”

From Patthar Ho Jayegi Nadi, 2007

All Poems of Mohan Rana in This Issue Have Been

Translated By Arup K. Chatterjee


Manash Bhattacharjee | p. 27 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)


Bhattacharjee, Manash. “Poems by Manash Bhattacharjee.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics

1.2 (2011): 27-31. Web.

Licensed Under:

"Poems by Manash Bhattacharjee" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a






At Hauz Khas Ruins

To Anindita & Richa

Mad pigeons play

Hide and seek

Over silence of stone

Voices call out each

Other with names to dispel

The fear of stone

Lovers hold hands

And bury time

Over secrets of stone

We found a claim etched

Against the roofless cubicle

Of stone:

"Fahim loves Pooja"

We wondered about

Love

In a different century



The Same Street

I took you to the same street

Which was not your street

But a street where I walked

Alone or with a friend

For days and years and for days

Which were years

And there was no love and I wondered

Along the street and the trees

Where is this love along the street

Like the sudden face of a stranger

Or the face of someone I know

But they all passed me by

As if I was just one face among many

Along this street.

And I wondered whether I am meant

To catch someone’s gaze

Or just be a passing shadow

Until you arrived with your ears in your eyes

And your heart in your hands

I told you stories of this street

When you were absent

When I didn’t lose company with

Myself so that you will find me.

We walked this street where it was

About to rain

And where the sky had disappeared.



But we scarcely noticed

As we were caught up between

Our own eyes

Until it rained and we looked for shelter.

We neither ran nor walked

But our steps were in a hurry to find a place

Where we would find no place

Except our own heads now watered down

To our feet and how I always loved your feet

Of flowing water

And I couldn’t say whether the street was flowing

Or your feet from the rain.

I recognized you

Once again from all the water that was flowing

As you were the water flowing

Since days over years and a day from a single

Life of days of rain and lonely street

And the rain brought everything together.

In the same street one night we met a man who

Told us that in his earlier life

He was either born a toad or a peacock

And that if we don’t find him

Anywhere else we should look for him here in the rain.

First published in New Writings from India, Vol. V, Penguin



The First Train

The first train is also the

Last train which runs

In memory.

I remember it was dawn

And cold and very wet.

I bid goodbye to the

Neighbourhood roads as father

Urged the rickshaw puller

To ride us faster.

Father spoke of time

More than he spoke of the train.

As if we had to catch time

Along with the train.

The station was a page

From a story book.

People were stationed like heavy

Luggage waiting to be lifted.

But father was too anxious to wait.

He kept looking at his

Watch restlessly as if urging the

Train to reach us faster.

But soon we heard the train

Would come a bit late.

Father looked angrily at

His watch as he cursed the train.

He behaved the same way

Every time I was late for school.

I felt trains were naughty

Children who never arrive on time.


Arup K Chatterjee | p. 32 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)

Arup K Chatterjee

Chatterjee, Arup K. “Poems by Arup K Chatterjee.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2

(2011): 32-40. Web.

Licensed Under:

"From, Hundred Miles Around Dacres Lane" (by Arup K Chatterjee) by Coldnoon:

Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.




from, Hundred Miles Around Dacres Lane

by Arup K Chatterjee

On Revisiting Tollygunge Cemetery

Long ago a Mohammedan fantasy

Used to creep as we walked the graveside road –

The graves of Muslim elders as I knew,

As if the younger ones could never die –

And I dreamed willingly the dreadful dreams

Their long and grey beards of Kashmiri wool

It must be them who sing the haunting azaan

Those old spirits that have never been free

Ma taught me ghosts and God were one

She indulged me but left me dream

Even when dreams had just begun

All ghosts and God would Muslim seem

The hospital that stood quite adjacent

Has been dilapidating even now

"Here is where they die" as I used to think

No one has killed me nor I killed any

For having such hideous adolescence

Today I walk again the graveside road

And I am not worth killing anymore

Neither the Muslim elders talk to me



Ma took me to eat biriyani

At the dargah some Saturdays

In Prince Anwer Shah's Colony --

Still it stunts my sight in a haze

Tollygunge cemetery still lies here

I do not know when I relinquished it

It must have been around my eighteenth year

When I totally stopped questioning God

When I totally stopped to walk by him

Biriyani at dargah was always stale

But Ma went to relish some spectacle

Was it the dusting off of sins with a broom?

I would never know what it was

Ma by now has forgotten too

The road goes on, the memory follows

The walker one, the lives were two



Rear Window Crimes

I have been watching domestic assault

Everything is too verbal to report

There is no mustard oil or ginger-garlic

So, a mathematics tutor is replaced

Since morning it has been so clamorous

This Sunday-husband and Sunday-father

Reads The Sunday Statesman and a report card

And both of them featuring old details

Today again is holiday

Today no gravity, speed or mass

Let us not talk of Faraday

"In the next term I will surely pass"

Today is Victoria Morning Sunday

Today is Kalighat Cricket Coaching

The daughter will quietly hide in the terrace

With forbidden pages of Sananda

The telephone knows Baba is at home

But telephone bills can come anytime

The morning will clamour in markets and homes

Till a Sunday afternoon rattling of trams

Let us go to New Market please

Let us eat at Park Street today

No barrels of sand on donkeys

Of all they do are doze and bray

Today is the Charlie Chaplin hour

Today is the Surabhi 7 'o' clock

Today is the slumber of fish and rice

Today is the forsaken taxi stand

Today if it rains few footsteps will mar



Marred potholes of Shyambazar chowrasta

If winter, we will look for mustard oil

To oil our body in the secret terrace

So the tutor will be replaced

In the absence of mustard oil

All is halting, all time erased

Just Sunday tramlines rattle in foil



Two Letters and an Octave

Baba,

There is a photograph I want to show you. I feel very moved when I see it. I

imagine you as the man in it. And I feel guilty, overjoyed, and always very

moist with many unknown feelings. The photograph is of a rickshaw puller. I

took it last month, here at Bhowanipore, as I was crossing the street in

Jadubabu Bazar. Ever since it has been printed I felt guilty of the slyness with

which I captured this tired labourer. Maybe a portrait of you during your work

hours would make me feel the same things. There are so many things about

him I do not know. I think it is best that way. I am sending you the

photograph, Baba.

Lovingly,

Sheshank

________

Ammi,

Selim is writing this for me. He can write very good Bangla now and also some

English. Last night he beat me very much after coming home drunk. I tried to

oil the calluses on his feet. He even threw the plate away. There was only

starch rice to eat. He brought some money and glass bangles. I wore them. He

did not even look at me. Some broke when he crushed my wrist. I worry about

tonight. I want to cook something for him. Selim is going to school. He will

drop the letter on the way. Ammi, he smiled at me before he picked up the

rickshaw handle. I just hope it doesn't rain today. Roads become harsher for

his feet.

Ayesha.

________



She swept away the last of broken bangles

He packed some puffed rice and white onions

And tied to the handle of the rickshaw

Before he pulled the handle to his waist

He looked at her and whispered very softly

Do you know how beautiful I think you are?

She stared at his calluses, he trotted past

A photographer trailing, under grey skies



On the Way Back To Nehru University, New Delhi, in February

From interior Bengal to New Delhi

A lavish wedding to a railway platform

The ceremony is larger hereabouts

The food stalls outnumber cousin's marriage

The red robes outnumber our wedding aunts

As I bend to count the platform footfalls

They crisscross like million camera lenses

Instead of Brahmins here beggars are fed

We call them porters, rather they are

Old settlers transporting follies

That travellers bring from near and far

In cartons, portable strolleys

Why do I compare this to a marriage?

I am, by far here, the most unwelcome

And I wish them away as they wish me

And we all tussle for the platform gate

And we all will tussle out of this womb

Until the stillborns and unborns are left

For in every face we can see our sins

We have left at the last boarding station

Cities will marry cities here

Children will come, children go back

Coolies will doctor our births clear

Our secrecy will cost in black

Is it the childhood wind calling again

With the evening lullabies of springtime?

I will carry my luggage on my own

It is difficult to be borne again

And harder still to be coming back



To air and sunshine, ageing one more year

To remember weddings from every spring

To be stranded on stairs as worlds surpass

Here to auto stand, hundred miles,

A railway engine whistles by

I travel, haggle, purloin smiles

The suitcase has no alibi


Murissa Shalapata | p. 41 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)

Murissa Shalapata

Shalapata, Murissa. “Poems by Murissa Shalapata.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2

(2011): 41-47. Web.

Licensed Under:

"Poems by Murissa Shalapata" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a





Murissa Shalapata

The Streets

A Palazzo, A Bridge, A Prison

Dirty metal shackles carved

deep within the rough stone

I walk the same halls, streets and repent

my head as heavy as your every day wrists

holding on to the idea of the outside

with nothing but memory of bloody Christ drawings

So with a sigh you make your own drawings

and everything is determinedly carved

as if time remembers like stone

maybe it is too late to repent

with the preparation of the slashing of your wrists

the inside becomes your outside

when I saw your outside

and the patient drawings

of the carved

and riddled stone

it made me want to repent

as I massaged my wrists

The ache of my wrists

when I placed them outside

the cobbled drawings

in the impeccably carved

boxy churches within the stone



of your cell where I try to think of the urgency to repent

To reach between these gates to repent

whittle, like keys, the bones of my wrists

to where I can see your bone or my bone on the outside

my smaller finger bones run along your drawings

like a meditation and they are once again carved

and remembered like an ink stone

My fingers scratch the imprint you left in chalk stone

my forehead, shoulders and chest itch, sigh, to repent

but what it felt like to not possess the key to my wrists,

and to walk names of the streets outside,

elude me like children's drawings

not like yours with dates, 1899, all carve



Visions Of a San Franciscan Chinatown

With stretched out leather Italian sandals in grey I landed

on top of Jack Kerouac's name in gold

a Hollywood replica in literary memorial

a square in cement

What better way than with a street sign too?

000-->

Jack Kerouac A narrow alley with a neon sign at the end warning

(Adler) Margaritas

(blocking City Lights)

No littering

No right turns

I shot the scene with a Chinese man who wouldn't budge

-that subject challenging author trope-

he leaned against the post, hands in his jeans

black sunglasses, a cream chapeau and a suitcase by polished shoes

It was clear, through the black shade of glass,

that he was looking at me

looking more Western like an Eastwood



Reflections Of Venize

Friari

With crimson Bardolino in hand

I taste you, Venize

your mind numbing routes of destiny

like untangling knots of angel hairs

in a hurry by the hour glass of spices

that smell of sulfur, basilico, lemon and grass

I paid little attention to your streets

of uneven marble and stone

besides when I tripped and was face to face

with my own salty self

Ponte Rialto

sick of the view

sick of the weighty feet that wears her down

each

year

closer to her teal bowels

I round and there, stone-faced

built-in virgin on the street corner

and me - a tourist, an atheist -

in the thrill of abandonment

discovering someone new

in me

In time

Adriatic sun feeds

sweat stems down my back

growing from my blue floral neck

soaking into black cotton



At the doors of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari

smells like an antique old wood shop in rain

kicked a crippled Italiano

hunched

with a ringing clinging chalice

in need of spare jewels

from any contemporary Franciscan

who's willing to be buried beneath the stone

in the floor of the church

knowing it doesn’t matter in the end

I pass him

despite his purple tumors

despite his fortune

that any icy creature of Cain

would trade for my

lecture of pictures

and stone

and men that don't matter any more

Nor do I care

when in the presence of Canova

his tomb of sleep

his pyramid of death

A sleeping winged lion

mourners that you drew (for the death of another)

stays guard of our dreams

Does the patron let you roam Venize at night?

When the flock and exchangelings are away

and everything evaporates into the smell of Adriatic



at once you know

it doesn’t matter in the end


C. S. Bhagya | p. 48 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)

C. S. Bhagya

Bhagya, C. S. “Poems by C. S. Bhagya.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.2 (2011): 48-54.

Web.

Licensed Under:

"Poems by C.S. Bhagya" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative





C.S. Bhagya

December Walk

I drift

through an ill, ginger-tea winter

through a city stammering in cold

syllables. I drift

through a road taut with absences:

people have retreated

to parts of the city they believe

less desolate, and people

who cross despite are split

in two directions: some who leave

and some who leave.

Between this building and that

the body lifts in grains, in mist-breath

dense steps, the body moves.

And on all days that one tree cranes out,

barren year-round,

head protruding bird like fruit

in sharp cries, the aftermath of labour.

Now I drift

in a subtracting weather.

Here dogs practise camouflage,

bundling back into limbs

in a mess of dead leaf, light



wood-debris.

Here trees give birth to crows.

And here all our close shaves with death

become life: sunlight

appearing on grave mornings

like a hymn –

deferral to December’s white logic –

to present grace, heal in yellow plaster

a year’s broken door.



Airports

In a far corner I glimpse bleach and red

aeroplane-fins stab air, parked on giant

runways like great fish, some metal whale.

They leave a sense of unease in me,

airports, with those cool persistent voices

on speakers insisting we report suspicious

behaviour, objects; think, right about now

miscreants in disguise abandoning bombs,

and in a second all these lovely, anonymous

smooth floors, gaunt ceilings, dishevelled

people, babies in trolleys may vanish

in one inverted vortex of speed and sound

and light. But then you, who I came to see

through these doors, marshalled by uniformed

men, ushered to customs, immigration and

an alien tongue; you, who I trust to the skies

with others waiting for distance like flocks

of birds, look back and wave through thick

glass walls, evening a white glaze in your eye.

And your lips form frantic, familiar words

soundlessly.



The City in The Hills

Nose ring aglint, this man

arrows through a Mobius strip alleyway

in the lowest spill of my city

filled with so many people its walls are breaking.

In its animal heat, somebody once said,

was a lake and in that lake

what lies forgotten everywhere.

I forget, I say – it’s a little joke of mine –

when he hankers for truths

nobody cares about anymore in this new land

birthed between stray dog dragons,

cars spitting fire.

Somebody has been feeding him

the wrong stories for the right money.

It doesn’t matter now if I say

I don’t trade in what you are looking for,

his sunken stare will crave the gravel

of what’s left of the city in the hills

he thinks I take great pleasure in hiding

from his people

running through taverns clutching handbags

someone fooled them was leather,

books he travelled two thousand miles to read

when reading would have led him the same distance

away.

This man wants the hills from me

and will not rest until he has them.

So I tell him the lies I always tell.



(Once in a city in the hills there was a boy

who forgot his name,

and what he brought back from the city

was a stack of government papers

holding his navy blue fingerprint,

a passport photo which no longer

bears any resemblance to him.)

I tell him enough to keep me from trouble:

blundering history departments flourish under

blind patrons, hoarding

what they claim are the real stories:

unblemished, deathly pale.

I tell him just enough to carry him

on the rest of his journey

mulling over the wilderness

he will later think he came from –

a town he will lose sight of in time.

I don’t tell him I have an idea of this city

in the hills as one imagines

the shape of a song one never listened to before.

Sixty years is a long time

to remember a city somebody told you

you were born in, long enough to confuse

what it held in its shaky old heart

with every city you wanted to visit,

with incongruous minarets,

canals, crude statues of tribesmen

whose chipped shoulders no longer ache

of childhood.

I don’t tell him I have an idea of this

city in the hills, only an idea.

I’m making up its streets as I walk along.

So I tell him this city lived in a lake once,



like the city we’re walking in

but the lake has forgotten the city

and its people their lake,

but they come back

insisting they want to listen to its stories

telling me, you must be from the city

in the hills, you look like you must be from

the city in the hills, you have that look,

look I’ve come so far to hear of the city the in hills

so I may fall in love with my own


p. 55 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)

Editorial Board

EDITOR

Arup K Chatterjee

Poet, Critic and Researcher

Jawaharlal Nehru University

New Delhi, India

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Amrita Ajay

Researcher, and Teacher of English

University of Delhi, India

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

K Satchidanandan

Poet, and Former Professor of English,

University of Calicut

Former Editor of Indian Literature,

The journal of Sahitya Akademi

New Delhi, India

Lisa Thatcher

Writer

Sydney, Australia



Sudeep Sen

Poet, and Editor of Atlas Magazine

Editorial Director of Aark Arts Publishers

New Delhi, India, London UK

GJV Prasad

Poet, Novelist, and Critic

Professor of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Vice Chair, Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language

Studies

Editor of Journal of the School of Languages

New Delhi, India

Sebastien Doubinsky

Poet, Novelist, and Critic

Researcher, and Lecturer, Aesthetics and Communication

Aarhus University, Denmark

Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Dec '11, 1.2)

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