Departed Trains | Day 01 | #NaPoWriMo

Departed Trains | Day 01 | #NaPoWriMo

A short, sun-burnt hawker

strides down the dozing platform.

A wicker basket over his head,

balanced on a cloth-bun.

The corrugated station roof,

old and season beaten,

drapes the concrete in a tattered shade.

Potholes of light shining at his feet,

as he glides through the hot daylight shadows.

In a raspy voice, he calls out

'Ice-cream Kulfi. Kulfi Ice-cream',

almost swallowing the word 'ice' in the process,

startling a child awake on a nearby bench.

He turns to his mother, lips drawn down.

She looks away, not acknowledging -

a strip of white light by her face

travelling into her blouse.

The hawker already slow in his tracks,

stops in positive anticipation.

He uncaps an aluminium cone from his basket,

pushes a wooden stem and pulls out Delight -

cold, white fumes curling from its buttermilk tip.

The mother loosening a knot in the veil of her saree,

picks out a five-rupee coin and places it on

the child's stretched palm.

He steps down beaming,

passes the coin to the hawker

and grabs his Kulfi.

A microphone then crackles overhead,

disturbing the pigeons in their high metal roosters.

Bardhaman-Howrah local draws hissing into the station.

The quiet dismantled for a moment,

replaced by the engine’s breathing;

and the sun eclipsed in a swirling cloud of dust.

The Kulfiwala boards it, as faces suddenly

come alive inside the compartment.

Slowly the train starts to chug out,

pulling away with it the cold metal shadows.

Silence falls back, almost as immediately,

like a sea joining, ripped by speedboat trail.

In the child’s happy eyes, there I catch my burning wait.

Abandoned amid the scorching summer,

for me to take a different train home.

The kulfi melts, like memories in my heart,

running down his thin arms to the hook of his elbow,

as we cherish in the back of our mouth,

the sweet aftertaste of a love long gone. 

  

© Sobhan

Night Soaked Bodies

No warm shower of preparation

or faint wisps of cologne at

my wrist where the blood throbs hard.

I shall walk through your doors straight

and unkempt; my shirt untucked,

my hair ruffled, burnt to brown

from long summers I endured

searching souls of your kind.

So that when you cling to me,

you inhale the impatient nights of

sleeplessness imbued in my skin,

like soot settled on city trees

gasping for rain; the moist aura of

desolate hours in my breath that

I have writhed in bed to be closer to you;

and those still dark hours of oblivious stars

dropping at horizon, whom I have

reached out with my arms,

seeking for my wishes they fell to earth with.

Twisted in desires, I, however,

for once will try and wrench free,

when you would be holding me tightest

and not letting me go.

When your fingers will be scraping

down the hooks of my spine,

your moaning mouth half-rounded

in a blazing ecstasy and

a tremor rising in your legs,

I shall stop suddenly.

Let my fingers relax on your

haunches and withdraw my lips from your pubis,

watching your desperate anger

crush the sweat stained

sheets between your fingers.

For you to realize

what it is to abandon a body,

having long floored its heart.

© Sobhan

Prisoners of Love

I remember our first drink together.

I had brought you home to

rejoice my first salary, picking

on our way, a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

Driving the corkscrew spiral to

its very last thread, I had popped

the wine open, carefully pouring

into glasses that sat light-filled on the table.

How then you held one by its narrow stem,

your white thighs carelessly crossed

over my knees on the sofa and raised to your lips.

I watched stars flow into your mouth

from a yellow night - the sour rising to your eyes,

making clouds out of your thoughts.

And then when you lowered the glass,

the night was half drunk with distant stars

still swirling in it, and a matt red stain

of your lips printed to the rim.

I saw in that moist graze,

the fine lines on your lips vividly etched.

Thin cracks where the lipstick hadn't reached,

the pearl sized aperture where

your lips don't touch when you round them

and the drooping arc that completes your mouth.

Few more sips later,

with the night emptied inside,

there on the rim remained only

a smudge red stain of what

was once an intimate print.

With each slow raise, your lips

had met the crystal slightly moved

from where it last touched, even overlapped,

leading to a vapoury blotch of red lipstick,

spit and words unrolled.

What’s unnerving is that after all

these years of having gone our ways,

and my failing brain barely catching

any remembrance of the souls

I had drunk and got laid with;

it is your eternal existence

that glitters unsmudged from

the crystal edge of my redundant heart.

No one and nothing ever came

remotely close to reconstruct

my landscape, you left all dilapidated

with your promises.

Like fingerprints on the hilt of a dagger

that had claimed a life, I am but a

violated evidence of your love

with your lipprints on heartbeats

down my neck, sentenced to a

forever of yearning to be together;

this life or any other.

© Sobhan

Smoker's Phenomenon

It's a smoker's phenomenon perhaps,

to always hold the last puff a tad longer.

Letting the fumes spiral and widen inside

like ripples across a wind shaken lake,

inflating their chest to a maxima,

until it aches to sink back and then

grudgingly stubbing the fire out against

a tin ashtray; the toxic gas departing

through lips and purring from nostrils

quietly, in what seems to be a dreaded exhale.

Whether the last drag is the sweetest

or breaking from the high is sad,

it is all still an acceptable agony.

Unlike mine where I seem to be smoking

minced memories, rolled in a flammable leaf

of Time and burning recursively

between my lips.

My scarred heart that fervently

drags upon this lingering past,

fills my chest with massive clouds of tears

that never made way to weepings.

They stretch my lungs threatening to kill,

but I am far from quitting.

Smitten for life. And so I go on -

breathing in fire, blowing out voids.

For embers of love, after all,

can never be stubbed.

© Sobhan Pramanik

Porous Heart

Looking out of the window, far in the grey haze of evening, rising over the horizon like a soft trail of mountains is a dark sheath of pregnant clouds. Winds hauling it over the city, stretches over cramped buildings and rumblings roads like an immense umbrella of smoke, as I watch the monsoon pull over.

It reminds me of the porous roof overhead. How it had been like that since many seasons now. One that I still haven’t got in a mason for, not chosen to, to spread an ever layer of cement with his spatula. One that, like all the other bygone monsoons, would be a sieve with the first hard downpour, pouring in first as speeding drops then soon transforming into trickling streams, like a fountain placed upside down, spilling all over the room, crowding the corners in greying puddles of standing rain water. Walls soaking it up will start to green from the bottom, fresh dots of moss spreading like colour from a spray can. Pillows will feel sticky, drenched, their cotton clubbed inside from the dampness. The otherwise flat surface of my study table will start sporting bubbles, its white laminate peeling from the corners, the posts swollen.

As the clouds completely shroud the starlight, I connect this monsoon to the hurt she poured me with. Hurt that had hollowed a portion of my soul and continues to bore me with streams of sorrow very passing day. Hurt that after all these years, now happens to be the only evidence, against the love I yearned with my soul, almost begged, of her happening to me. Hurt that also is my sole witness of me losing my heart at the sight of her beaming eyes. An endearing ache that brings me to pictures of thunder fractures skies and maddening rain. And so I put my heart around it, around everything that brings no good but immense suffering, all the memories that are now ugly scars, in a sustaining wrap of holding on, to the person who had long wrenched her hand from my grip and moved on.

Hence, I ascend the bed quietly and lie sideways, facing the open window and the approaching clouds. Wisp of night jasmine drifting in. Followed by a blue spark of lightening, a stentorian roar of clouds crashing, before the water started to fall. In thick drops first that struck the leaves life bullets, then trickling from their margins onto dry earth, soon evolving into a relentless shower that muted every sound and scent of the bustling city. Just the rain and its smashing sound, as I felt the cold thud of the first drop, seeping through eroded layers of concrete of my roof, splatter onto my forehead. Followed by a second on the hollow over my lips, then a third somewhere on my chin and then, in no time, it was steady trickle drenching my whole body.

Beneath the pouring roof, clutching onto similarly porous heart, I let the rain pass into my bones and fill my eyes. Hoping, almost falsely, of waking up to a clear day and meeting the sun with rain kissed eyes for the rainbow we couldn’t be, of everything said and unsaid, to fill the arms of the sky.

By - Sobhan Pramanik