We, beneath the Kanchanjungha :
I have come to believe that not only the sea but the mountains are also within me
Every beauty of the earth is within me
I once said it to you, the beauty that I came across on the crossroads
And you laughed like a woman should laugh, with silence embraced with grace
The strange thing is the white mist never grasped you, even when everything is gone, I can see your trembling eyelids
Your cold skin and my warm hand on your face
Your hair flows as a natural spring that comes down from a forgotten point of the Himalayas
You smell of the mountains, the green hills, the bells of a monastery, and your eyes bear the sacred hymns of Tibetan language, never to be said but uttered with no sound, traveling to
Your own unknown deep soul
Will I ever reach you there?
You never cared for me to answer
Because by then the dazzling cafe lights were showered on you
The colorful flags on the mountains were flying high
The clock tower sounded seven times in the evening
You came a bit close to me, smelling now of the fresh earth which brings the rain
I tell you many things, a thousand useless things of a young man, his single room, sleepless nights, unstable job forever
And on nights when the blue moon was outside his window he wrote, forgetting all that pained him and brought nightmares
Do you still remember the first poetry I read you?
One dawn when there was no one on the road but an old man carrying a load of boxes on his bent shoulders, his face covered with wrinkles
Behind him was a boy who carried buckets of water
For those poor women of the hills who can never bathe due to shortage of water
They bathed on the road with their clothes on, wetting their hair and paying a high price for water
The boy would show the women the mirror in which they combed their hair
Are these the women Kipling ever spoke about?
I saw your face full of pain at that moment and you looked at me and came across me straight
And said me, “Not me, write about them”
And you kissed me
You walked down
And I could see in your hands you had gently folded my poem in a white sheet and kept it neatly in your bag
You turned at the point where you would be lost
Your eyes shining in the first sun
I followed you,
I saw Kanchanjungha glittering white with its head high, very high in the blue sky
We both stood there meaningless but happy.
_______
Note = “Kangchenjunga, also spelled Kanchenjunga, is the third highest mountain in the world.”
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangchenjunga ]
Calcutta, I owe you :
Perhaps we are destined to live a life of love and melancholy
The days and nights with you each time broke me cut me sliced me created me formed me
My utterings in a wrong time in a wrong mirror in a wrong road
But you understood it all
The women that danced before me
The buses that went halfway and stopped
The winds that roamed like an insane traveler at night
The old buildings, the known streets the wrecked alleys, the Bengali words in streets that always changed color but the fragrance remained the same
The horizon painted with flying birds
From sunrise to sunset I love the city
We have forgotten each other completely
We have forgotten nothing
We are in each other like a shadow in a body
I whisper you my dreams in my secret silence that only you can create
We met we sang we live in strings of joy and sadness
Calcutta I owe you my all those thousand births
Each uncaptured dance on the rope of time before the actual Spring comes!
Subhadip Majumdar is a writer and poet from India. He is certified in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. He was also a long-time editor for a reputed Bengali poetry journal. Subhadip has also written a short novel as Tumbleweed writer in Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France. Two poetry books have been published and one novel is in the process of publication. Books published on Van Gogh from New York and A Short Collection of Stories available on Amazon.
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