The Distance Makes It Possible — Poems by Sristi Sengupta

There’s the Crown Jewel Treasure House
then there’s the Soul Prince Select and even
though these are unliberal translations of the actual ones, we have
a whole many more of these here. Name it and they’ve got it.
At least a dozen semi-premium sweet shops in this lane if you began
from the mouth of 55 K. C street
and walked all the way down to the paperboat
factory turned lime-licked quag box.
Open kilns of curdling chenna, you’d just have
to be rocking at one of them at five-ish and the mutt would arrive in the next minute or
so –
a nightmare paint-by-numbers, each matted strand of calico coat
sticky and raw like shoots of an unsightly god tree.
He adheres to his good boy duties as long as
he is fed little big treats of pure dairy. It might be bad for his gut

or even his overall health but not accepting anything foreign
to his personal standards has helped him survive and probably –
regardless of travestying attempts by our local urchins, he wouldn’t
be sticking around to ward off supernatural evils for so long.

Service is always either on paper plates or little dishes made from
sal leaves because there are no seating arrangements,
you’d have to sweep it right off the counter after paying and stuff
yourself with your back towards the traffic and rubble.
Anything heavy, like metal, would be limited and the queue would remain
undispersed and queues like that remind my people of pandemics,
partitions, parties (and not the fun kind), slavery (yes, actual slavery)
and doomsdays. Light plates do just fine. You just need to watch
out for cars rushing past – they tend to bring in lewd gusts of wind
that lift the side of your thin plate like the hem of an underskirt.
Besides its instincts are already blighting its memory –
muscle by muscle tearing apart the disgusting garment of skin and hair
it’s as if all the matting is actually years of hopeless rumination.
Its muzzle, all crusty, from malign snot too thick to drip off;
you’d mistake the clicking of its old jaws for aggression –
It’s simply his best bet at breathing.

You still don’t have to throw it to the beast even if you’ve finished,
you’ll not be needed back to human life before 7pm anyways.
There’s tea, there’s ladle neck-deep, in the malai pot, there’s craft
and the fastness of craft. Worldness, its estrus.
When everyone’s grabbing an udder of the twilight,

like a pink mango in their palms – echoes of a conch shell
heave this pipe of a town street, and you never quite see it coming,
one of the oldest social mores to reach the has-beens every night, the gurus,
the ancestors, the setting sun. the neighbourhood awakens, home-by-home,
and the other instinct kicks in. The mutt tucks its tail
between his mangy legs and squirms under some sewer lid.
you finally throw the winky plate – its crunch dead from the syrup,
when a rickshaw pulls by — busted wheels creaking
thistoothistoothistoothistoo
Could’ve been nothing

But i cannot read it
right, ever; the missing
n more visible after each try
Until i proceed with plucked clarity at least
less confusing, like shower knobs at home
or hammock webs under eaves as opposed
to the tight, arched ones impossible to admire
without a delayed chirrup at their wind-proof-ness:
bare nerves of a dolomite hanging above the gardenias
squeezed under the shadow of my old neighbour’s parapet
only the moisture from my mispronounced stare percolates
and laces the dark pit with enough discomfort so the flowers
still bloom and wither, guarded against the frigid dislodgement
of children who race from the mouth of the bustee to the pond’s
edge shrieking with humour in their unchecked speed quite like
the a lurking out of place to enter and crack open a different meaning:
a callous graze of tires rolling on stick-ends –
who permits children to play beside my house – beside any house
at any hour? Why do children have to play? What is the best way
to dictate the most essential nuisances – spitting of toads, basking
of fuchka shells on the side of the road in heaps, the incessant
stealing by the supine crows from one heap, squatting
grannies at the timed tap between 4pm and 5 pm,
the browning of a babbler, yellow of its beak, its
friends’ beaks. So when an email comes crest-
ed with that word, I forget for a moment.
I forget there is no valid hour for a bird-
song or for playing, resting or bathing,
no pants that don’t feel like a skirt
being lifted up slowly and no thighs
that go on forever. Everytime,
even if only once, it ends.
I remember: around me
the things that appear with
the snap of my fingers
don’t disappear after
I snap again, or things
that appear at the
snap of the fingers
don’t care for a snap
anyways. Yesterday,
I found out I had
stopped check-
ing for birds in
trees. Sorry
for the delay
in my res-
ponse, allow
me three days
before I can
accept this
new life.

Best alternative is rising every
dawn – it’s the only time when last night’s
vegetable peel-rotting stench is

most acrid, unerring

she’s afraid you’ll try to pummel the scent
of her breasts (or what’s underneath
what’s underneath) so she insists –
or doesn’t – on your getting up and leaving.
But it is unnatural for you
to listen beyond words, afterall,
There is the birthplace of Thrill and Adventure.

Besides, when was the last time you stopped
to find her stunning? Now isn’t the time
that your repose could finally begin
to scald her bones. It is something else entirely

However, the veins it once grew on
become more active than ever
out of disorienting confusion
repeating, relentlessly, over and over again -
wake up at 5, toss out wheat for the birds,
dust pillows in the sun, wake up
at 5, toss out wheat for the birds, dust pillows
in the sun – wheats wake up at 5, birds dust
the pillows, the sun

a time comes until when
mantras don’t involve memory
and routine turns into prayer, that’s why
it’s not easy to find an answer for
How to live with a menopausal wife?
Instead, here’s what you might discover:
combing through her hair just so,
sleep descends upon the eyes of a maneating tiger in the quiet corner of her navel, or
gently rotating her stiff toes counterclockwise
might unfurl

her shoulders – even if not as they once did,
might bloom like her favourite purple petunias.
Perhaps a different question could do
the unhanging; what’s easier than learning to live
with a menopausal wife?

That’d put a pause to all the digressive information
on the internet like how to live with in the first place,
like it’s a condition or a commitment or the meaning of
Commitment
because all those years ago,

just days after she married you,
at the foot of the stairs
the dim kitchen filled with her muffled tears
over a tiny brown-green pea that had slipped
from her grasp,
you’d told her that something so small,
once lost,
can never be found again

I get grape-deep rests
while all of life rolls into morning thunder
and kohl lights up the eyes in the back
of our heads as we tilt to the lullaby
of stray orchestras.
conches are blown when cauliflower
clouds appear like hollowness
in between our brows;
we measure resilience by how fast
we can stifle the raspy hisses of our straw mattresses on hot concrete
the mid-day sun pleasure-burns watching you toss
yourself off on a lonely terrace
plants in argil tubs wait
for the caretaker and his can
waits for the tail of the cup stain to disappear
behind the horizon, then the cotton seeds buried
in our beddings march their souls into our dreams
and the last thing before we close our eyes:
votive thoughts pressed under the apses
Of the sky’s breasts
where I come from,
Tired is another word for unallowing -
Mood is the only word for intimacy:
sleep, the only way to attach yourself
to Erasmus. Cows. On the park grass.
Hoof marks. On lipbalms of girlfriends leaving for arithmetic coaching.
Hour after hour attempting
Mock Tests in that 12 by 16
Machiavellian centre of excellence
Fathers in their sweet, falled loin cloth.
Only anti-clocks ticking –
you and I smoking on my bed
back counting down to the last dimension
that separates us