Searching for Banalata Sen of Natore

A Goddess walks on a floor of smoke.
All at once, she rises out of time.
She turns around and sways a little, the music, oh, it’s divine!
Her eyes dark and lonely and slow,
as if locked in a time that is Twelve hundred years ago.
Swirling in mists of the night, the darkness prowls around her;
standing on its black hind-legs, it snarls and roars
as he stares longingly at her.
His vision begins to blur.

He searches for her, again and again,
through realms of verse and rhyme.
She seems as distant as she was,
like history lost in time.
He walks across the barren land;
Kutch and Thar on his feet.
He roams the mountains of the Himalayas
with nothing but the name of who he seeks.

She comes to him in the nights, coldest,
when the darkness preys on the fire.
She stands on the doorway, never coming or going –
She, of the Bird’s nest eyes.
She smiles her painful smile at him,
he eases back and cries.

‘Where have you been?’ He asks quietly at last.
‘I was always here’ She disarms him with her past.

The melancholy in her soul, cries out on the wind,
and her hair, as dark as night in Vidisha, flutters in that wind.
She blinks twice and the world stops.
‘What took you so long?’ she whispers and more.
He said had travelled through eons of time, through the mists of Bimbisara and Ashok,
to find her – Banalata Sen of Natore


1:23 AM
29th June, 09

PS: Written as a humble tribute to the legendary poem 'Banalata Sen of Natore' by the incomparable Jibanananda Das

Scenes from the road at 9.34 PM

A little girl in a dirty and red frock was dancing.
Round and round and round
her feet rocked on a steady ground.
English is the poor man’s language.
Rich with words, one too many words
so he calls himself a poet
and watches the little girl in a dirty and red frock dancing.
The night stalks him
and it when nobody is looking
is talks to him.
It hums its strange music, persistent as a drum.
Listen to it, listen to the night hum.
And the little girl in a dirty and red frock is dancing…
the world is not yet full of scum.

The dog, mangy and unloved, scampers across the road.
A black ambassador tears past it. The night is warm and young.
It just hangs in the air, does the night, it does.
Hanging there, quiet, wary of making a fuss.
The clerk walks past with a funny eye.
A gust of unwelcome wind sweeps the street,
and the orange light from the lamp-post quivers.
“It’s the city, it’s the city” – it whispers.
Then dies out, the wind, it does,
without warning, as it absolutely must.
And all that remains is a strange music
and two tiny feet rocking a steady ground.
As the world turns in a dirty, red haze…
they keep dancing – round and round and round.