One discovers poets, when one is ready to discover them, the mind gathers little stories about them and stores it in some corner for posterity. I read Shakti Chattopadhyay without seeing his image sometime back. For some strange reason I did not want to see him. Imagination is a strange thing, it makes stories out of people..out of nothing..even conjures up some wildness in between. Stories about Shakti Chattopadhyay reciting poems deep into the night on lonely streets with his friends struck somewhere..and a consistent image of a man standing beneath a street light, one foot on the road, one on a rock..loudly reading his poems from the heart looking at the insects swirling around a lonely lamp post..is where I imagined him. I walked dingy roads and tried finding him, stood on a rock and sang a song and then this came- The shadows are long in unknown streets the insects hovering over sick neon lights like strangers from faraway lands, they look beautiful under shadows and die in the sun, each day. A small boy sits in its jaundiced light, sick and yellow with hunger? Somewhere from a remote gali Pakeeza comes alive- a Shakti too perhaps? I climb a rock and read a poem, I scream I shout and enact, at my nonexistent audience. They clap in their busy songs, in callousness strewn over each other. A black moth approves- People fill the roads like rats, milling over- careless, faceless, hurry in every crease. Lovers pause for life, behind a lamp, a shrub? Life lives for a while. A phone rings, my shadows come home- On the road back, in pieces I become my role and play it. Remembering him today I walk the roads restless again for an image of his shadow. I cross the road and see at a distance, a man. I cross the road back again and come closer. An auto driver, seated in hi auto..without driving it, wild haired, singing a Carnatic song, hands in the air..somehow poetry & Shakti both came home.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 08:48:58 +0000
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