It’s four in the morning, the end of December
I am writing you in the hope that this is my last letter
A letter of all letters
A masterful tome of you and me and all the worlds we have seen.
I will be dead by the time you read it
Your famous blue raincoat hangs on my coathook
It rains as though you will ring the bell any moment
As though you had just puffed out a cigarette at my door
As though the world had never changed season
As though the coathook hadn’t been bare across three hundred years
As though there hadn’t been a winter of three hundred years
As though I was once alive
As though we had once been in love.
I wrote this poem earlier this year (first published in the RIC Journal), as an ode to Leonard Cohen. I sort of grew to like the three hundred year old coathook imagery of hope. Perhaps, hope is an illusion, and the coathook is just a vestige of another time. When one is young, one doesn’t often think that time, a lot of time, decades in fact, will actually come to pass. Loves will erode, hates will become bleak, church spires will turn salty, women will turn sour, and men of innocence will turn into cunning sovereigns. Cunning sovereigns will turn into weird, droopy-eyed, forgotten men, regimes will fall, restaurants will shut down. Cities will breathe quietly into the dead of the night speaking out all these stories that they have borne witness to.
Pete Seeger came to Calcutta along with Suman Chattopadhyay, the pioneer of 90s Bangla rock/ballad music, they sang together in Nazrul Mancha and it was all over the newspapers. I was maybe twelve years old. And Calcutta was still a city of action. Jacques Derrida, I am told came to the Calcutta Book Fair, in the early 1990s and the book fair caught fire. It was said, that he performed “deconstruction”. Princess Diana was killed in a car accident, and we couldn’t stop watching the footage on the telly. I read God of Small Things and read out Arundhati Roy’s essay End of the Imagination in the school elocution. I read D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover wrapped in newspaper, in eighth grade, hiding it under the lid of the desk in the school classroom. Sex was directly on the page, and one had to be stupefied by it. I co-wrote two plays for the school theatre team. We lost poorly to another school at a debate competition, and I cried on stage (if I remember correctly). A co-conspirator friend gifted me a Phil Collins cassette tape on my birthday. At this time, I felt terrible about not understanding the big deal about Pink Floyd. I only knew foreign music from the tapes that my parents owned - The Beatles, Nancy Sinatra, Frank Sinatra, Bob Marley, John Denver, and of course, Harry Belafonte. These were not considered cool in my school. People read out from Eliot’s Macavity at the elocution competition, and I had no idea who Eliot was. I tried to drown out all this coolness by scoring 100 out of 100 in a History exam. The dear teacher wrote “I am speechless!” on the answer script. This made me feel a bit better.
I read Joy Goswami’s poems, at the suggestion of our school Bangla teacher. There was a time when I wrote better Bangla than I wrote English. The comic sorrow of the old colonial city seemed to merge with the poet’s words. There were frequent strikes, and buses were often burnt on roads. Everyone spoke of politics all the time. I thought of words on the page and their power of magic. Many years later, I watched Goswami speak at a Calcutta conference from the back row of a large hall. His eyes seemed like those of a faraway mystic.
I remember the 1992 Babri Masjid riots vividly. There was curfew in the city. My aunt had given birth at a hospital in north Calcutta, an area that was quite troubled, and adults in the family looked grim. An ad guy who was our neighbour went about in a yellow Maruti Zen with a Press sticker on the front pane, and that sounded very cool. Valentine’s Days passed year on year, and no one made a move at me. Curfews and Valentine’s Days passed as milestones into my growing up wanting to fly. Calcutta felt claustrophobic soon enough.
What strikes me most today is that these were real times, real people, real cassette tapes, real shoelaces, and real emotions. All real things die. Everything changes. Some of us live on as vestiges of a different time.