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  • পরবাস | Shakti Chattopadhyay | Poem
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  • All of us : Shakti Chattopadhyay
    translated from Bengali to English by Nandini Gupta
    All morning, they told us stories of our lost days,
    They did not ask us to get up
    Instead, they said, sit down and listen
    Those days that you left behind—
                no one picked them up after you.
    You lose money, people following will find and keep
    You lose your way; people will line up to walk that path
    Leave a corpse behind, jackals and vultures will feed on its flesh
    Leave the door open, a woman will hastily collect your brassware
    You leave your home behind: Nothing will remain! Nothing!
    You throw away tattered clothes
    Broken lamps, old papers, letters, leaves from trees—
          There is always someone to pick them up.
    But you will not find your lost days lying around.
    The farther you go, you get closer to death.
    They will tell you— this is life, this is fulfilment, in its entirety, the whole.
    This is you know, what they call
                   society, religion, literature, meditation, the ultimate prize, melancholy—

    They kept telling us stories of our lost days all morning
    But never said where they found them.
    Never owned up to have stolen them from where we’d left them
          Those misplaced dreams, misplaced memories
    They went on and on
          telling us of those dreams and memories beyond compare,
    And so, we lived them again— those lost tales
       That we had mislaid through the years
    In woods or meadows, inside used notebooks,
    On writing slates, at festival grounds,
    In rivers, seas, beaches, roads, trees, talkie houses
    In stations, ferry ghats, in Kolkata or in villages,
    In someone’s hair, on someone’s face,
    In someone’s eyes, in someone’s promises—
    We have lost we have lost we have lost—
    Knowing well enough we will not find them again.
                            Never to find again
    Those days of storm rain autumn sunshine.
    Those days of childhood nakedness, of weeping, of receiving coins
    We will never find again
    Never again those days of sailing paper boats
                      in the momentary tumult of an ocean in my yard
    Never to find again never to find again never to find again
    Those moonlit days of falling leaves and words
                We will never find again.

    All morning some people sat us down and told us of those lost days
    We got nothing done this morning
    For an eternity we sat silently listening to those stories of lost days
                      Like policemen
    Determining our course of action like policemen
    Wondering whether to ask Lucky and Mita1 to go look for those lost days
    Seated there, we busied ourselves with turbulent dreams of desultory possibilities
    Thus, we travelled through the ups and downs in time , one after another
    Then they said, “The van is here, go on, go on, get on it—
    If you stay here a tiger will eat you up”
    At once, leaping, jumping, crawling, walking, we moved towards the future-van
    To escape the tiger licking us to the bone here
                           We all fled towards the tiger that is there.


    [1] Lucky and Mita were two police-dogs with the Kolkata Police in the seventies

    The original poem 'Amra Sokolei' (আমরা সকলেই) was collected in 'Parer Kantha Matir Bari' (পাড়ের কাঁথা মাটির বাড়ি) published by Bishwabani in November 1971


    অলংকরণ (Artwork) : Ananya Das
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