Come woman, let’s bathe together

Come woman, let’s bathe together

We know which shampoo can remove dandruff, cleans your hair,

We know which soap can keep the germs away 
We know, we know, we know all, you know,
What to apply on nails, what to apply on toes,
What to, and, what not to apply on our faces.
Come woman, let’s bathe together
What we don’t know is what to apply to remove the age-old dirt
The dirt of hatred
The dark marks of imposed power on our bodies
Where is the herbal, where is the chemical
Where are the brushes, sponges and scrubbers?
To remove the glutinous norms
Come woman, let’s bathe together
Bring the sponge luffa
Let’s remove the marks of those measures today
Come woman, let’s bathe together today
by cleansing ourselves
You’ll become you
I’ll become me
By being yourself you’ll be mine
Being myself I’ll be yours
Today is the time
Come woman, let’s bathe together

(To Til Jethai, my aunt who used to scrub me when I was a child)

An Ode to Your Loneliness

I know how lonely you have become,

Even after splitting into two from one single body,

When you have gained the warmth of closeness of an 'other'

mesmerizing each and every moment of the days and nights,

even then,

you have become extremely lonely.

Because it is only you who would take care of him,

it is your lonely body, where milk is being produced for the child,

the loss of a siesta without any scope of an alternative

it is all yours

all the disarranged hunger and thirst

it all is yours,

extremely isolated you are walking through this

endless passage, which is all yours,

It is your lone and last shelter, and yet, you are helpless in front of it,

embracing the absolute wealth of life and the universe

you are destitute today

Mother, how could you do it?

How could all women do?

you are asking this question again and again

to yourself

Women, even if I could touch every inch of you

We could never touch this helpless loneliness of your motherhood

what an inevitable role the universe offered to you!

I salute to the unbearably terrible loneliness of every mother on earth.

Happily Biased

I am not impartial, do not ask me to be the same.

I am biased, and I mean it. This is not a sarcastic comment in any means.

In fact, I'm gradually prejudiced, by my choice, more and more, day by day...

The day you said, 'I really loved you', it meant you were about to leave.

Words make no sense.

I keep remembering the epic fail of the epic story of becoming

when Ma-Ra turns to Ra-Ma...

And then the fiction becomes history.

You asked me to say 'I love you' utterly loud every day.

If I said, it were just a flattering to your wish.

If I didn't, it were also a conceit.

That's how I may decide not to listen you carefully.

When meaning lies elsewhere, sense echoes at far distance,

I may not agree to follow your words only for the sake of

political correctness.

When one shouted Azadi, you understood it as per your understanding.

Words failed again.

That's how I am partial. Biased. I am just happy in that way.

Before you drop a word, tell me first, which side you are on.

I'm on the side of love. Thus, biased for love.

I won't stop loving. I'm prejudiced that way.

[Please make sure, even if you are on the other side of the road,

when I wave my hands, you too wave your hands for greetings!

Either bless me, or curse me. I'll be fine with both. But do it for sure.]

# HappilyBiased #PoliticallyIncorrect

What the hell would I do with a Nation...

If someday some intruders come and occupy my country,

I wouldn't have any problem.

I am not at all anxious in the increasing population of the Muslims,

The Bangladeshi Immigrants have never spoiled my peace of mind.

I do not like the hue and cry you make in the name of your country.

I do not have any problem if my country gets scattered into pieces.

I don't care someone's statue

whether placed or not at the crossroad.

Who just came and started farming upon whose land...

it were never a matter of concern of mine.

What concerns me is if the land is still a barren land...

This stagnancy you brought to the everyday life -

with a mockery towards social concern and revolution

- I have problem just out there.

Slurring life, this numbness  of soul,

and next to it the huge discontent you make for power

- I have problem just out there.

An open green field turns to a dirty slam in the name of development

- I have problem just out there.

 This country is full of rivers, water bodies and heavy rainfalls

and then there is always scarcity of fish in the market,

- I have problem just out there.

Pushing behind a world of love, I cannot embrace a country of hatred.  

Pushing behind a world of love, I won't embrace your nation of hatred.  

Even today people try to segregate people in the name of religion

- I have problem just out there.

If I fail to become a human first, what would I do with a nation?

Nation was only human's need. Wasn't it?

(*badly Translated from Assamese)

Agony and Ecstasy of an Actor

NINTH SKANDHA from "Ravana Katha"

1

 I don’t know very much, but a very little.

                        I don’t know why people sing, why they paint, why even perform.

             Why do people touch each other’s hand as if that is how they ‘recognize’ touch.

             I don’t comprehend tears, laughter, encouragement, and dejection.

 Why do people yawn, why even sneeze.

Why do people take a turn in their sleep.  

(There’s no language for tears,

there’s no country for lullabies,

the only country is childhood in you,

I only understand this.)

    I don’t understand this between why and why not. I don’t know why I do theatre. [1]

2

This time I am a performer, an actor. Gentlemen, please give me your ears.

    You can’t blame me to be pretentious. Because, you too are pretentious.

If I wear the ten headed mask upon my face, definitely I’ll be the Ravana in your eyes. I’ll enact, which is nothing but pretensions. Okay, I accepted everything. But it is equally true that you are also pretending as if you believe me to be Ravana, and nobody else. [2]

Then why blame me?

So, let us pretend.  Let us pretend again and again. Pretension,

 Only pretension will be our mere mean of communication.

3

 I know, every act is some kind of enactment of some act.

Each moment we act.[3] At this very moment,

I’m acting like a writer and you are like a reader or a listener.

  While opening a file in your office, if you are unable to forget that

you are a lover,

 You are somebody’s wife or husband

Or a poor citizen,

Being seated on your reading table if you don’t forget that you are a responsible father,

 A social worker or a singer,

                                    You are a journalist or a gambler or a football player,

 Putting your eyes into your beloved’s eyes if you still keep yourself remembering

 How much is left to reap in the field of paddy,

 Or if suddenly you remember that you have forgotten to add sugar to the cup of tea;

                                                Then know it,

You are a flop actor.

4

Everyone enacts,

as we have our pasts and futures[4],

as we have our identities,

as we have our heavens to provide us our times[5].

as we have fear of loosing our identities,

 When you walk on the streets you are a traveler,

An eater while eating food.

In front of your father, beloved or a master you are constantly acting like

A son or daughter,

 A lover

 Or a disciple.

When I an actor enter to the stage for acting, only then, I offer myself to be seized  that                I’m an actor. I’m mere a performer.

Only that is the time, an actor offers the ‘self’ to be seized

At that very moment being seated among the audience’s seat you start to pretend that you are not believing me as an actor. With all your conscience, you pretend that I’m not a mere performer. I am either X, or Y, or Z.  I am Ravana. You let your ears open to listen me, keep your eyes open to see me.

5

Being a performer I ever liked the wings and the skies of a proscenium.

Won’t you stare at me if I have a pair of real wings in my back?

Won’t you hear me if I stand under the real sky and start to speak?

 My wings are hiding me.

My sky is constantly limiting my territory.

My cyclorama is my horizon.

I never can reach beyond these; neither can I touch your hand in real.

Again and again I become the Ravana.

I start my interior monologue. Dedouble[6] myself.

 Ravana is not only a mythological character; or an image built up in our grandmother’s tongue, in our childhood days.

Ravana is also a ten-headed – Bhaworiya, actor.

---

[1] These lines were written much earlier and performed in various places. Translated into English by Parnab Mukherjee.

[2] Actors are probably the only art makers who can be told (in response to gestures they make with their vocal and physical apparatus, their own attributes and their responses) by an observer that what they have palpably executed is not real or truthful. Anuradha Kapur

, “Actors Prepare”, Theatre India, N S D. Vol-9

[3] Once B V Karanth explained in a theatre workshop, while dealing with actor’s training.

[4] The actor or actress represents, but what he or she represents is always still in the future and already in the past, where as his or her representation is impassible and divided, unfolded without being ruptured, neither acting nor being acted upon. It is in this sense that there is an actor’s paradox; the actor maintains himself in the instant in order to act out something perpetually anticipated and delayed, hoped for and recalled. The role played is never that of a character: it is a theme (the complex theme or sense) constituted by the components of the event, that is, by the communicating singularities effectively liberated from the limits of individuals and persons. The actor strains his entire personality in a moment which is always acting out other roles when acting one role.        

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense P. 171.

[5]  There is time for everyone, under the heaven: from bible, used by T. S. Eliot in his Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock. Pit Seegar composed a famous song “Turn Turn Turn” on it.

[6]  A term coined for interior monologue, see discussions on the poem mentioned above.

Dance

'I want to dance', she said. 

I encouraged: 'Dance, as if no one is watching you'.
She tried, but then, she caught me watching.
She blindfolded me first,
then to make it sure, she smothered me to death.

Now she dances upon Kankhowa's graveyard
- as if no one is watching her...

KATTAMASAI A Piece of Performance Poetry, 2002

NOTE:

KATTAMASAI is an autobiographical fiction written in a surrealist manner by Benodebehari Mukherjee. In Bengali Kattamasai means master of house hold. Here Benodebehari uses the term to personify his inner self.

“Benodeda lost his eyesight in 1956…but he took it with his usual stoicism. There was not a trace of self pity in his attitude. He took it as easily as it was a passage from one room to another.”

“He saw in a new light the relationships of sensations and their interpretations and the special role of fantasy in their inter-space. He recognized that the dark world of a blind man has its configurations, depths and formalities different from those of the bright world of others.”

“KATTAMASAI is a fictionalized chronicle of this passage written as a chain of anecdotes of various grades of depth and complexity. The introductory anecdote is neat surrealistic and radiates various wavelengths of meaning.” (K G Subramanyan, ‘From translator’s note’)

  

During the Making of KATTAMASHAI by Mahan J Dutta

I write without seeing. I came. I wanted to kiss your hand... This is the first time I have ever written in the dark... not knowing whether I am indeed forming letters. Wherever there will be nothing, read that I love you.

Diderot, "Letter to Sophie Volland", June 10, 1759

*

Now I am there where I can’t hear anybody

Nobody hears me either

A scream of mine does not reach my ears

Kattamashai rests on the ruins of the words

Floating away into the formless colorless limitless void…[1]

Today

I am a representative of darkness in the world of light[2].

If I were able to know myself

The bottomless ocean of knowledge would have been in my grip[3]

If I could weep with fear in a lonely house,

 If I could pluck out my eyes and eat them,

 I'd do it for your ...[4]

When I give up I gain a lot.

It becomes easier to live a life

When you’re a destitute, when you have nothing to lose

It is easy to be happy, easy to go mad.

“Why is it so dark? Why don’t you put the lights on?”

From all the four sides numerous voices say,

“All lights are on, Kattamasai.”[5]

Darkness is more real than light

It exists in itself, without the need of a source.

However, reality is that where you do exist

I am hearing a horn from a train passing away.

The last train of the world.

All the people are going to another world[6]

Far from me, for forever.

Nobody is left. No man. No woman.

Now I am at a place devoid of fire.

Tom Hanks struggles for a sparkle[7].

Refugee? Who is not? We all are in exile, we're shelter-less.[8]

Heraclitus,

I dip into the same river of solitude again and again

A man is an island. An isolated island.

It communicates to others by the boat of sympathy.

If the boat fails to leave its own island under any circumstance

Or if it is destroyed in the mid ocean

The communication collapses[9]

Yet, man prefers to be an island.

Yet, the unavoidable void is full of gains.

Goodbye then, Rudranarayan

Between the two of us there is an impassable chasm,

It cannot be crossed. Do you hear me?[10]

The gold I lost in daylight is found in the dark night.

Don’t look at, don’t touch,

Keep awakened your soul towards…[11]

No, I am not Hamlet, the prince of Denmark.

Neither I am J Alfred Profrock.[12]

I dreamt a nonsense dream.

I believed a nonsense belief.

Today, like Caligula, I can make a wish for the moon.[13]

I’ll by a horse. I’ll call it Rozenante.[14]

And go out for a universal conquest.

Now, I can feel

A music is nothing but a geometrical progress,

I can visualize a sound; I can hear a color somehow

Time too has its own limit. Once,

The journey of light comes to an end as well.[15]

Now, I can see an ever seen but unseen dream.

Samudra in s still from Diploma Film Kattamashai, by Mahan J Dutta

---

[1]Last lines from Benode Behari’s Kattamashai

[2] Benodebehari Wrote out his memoir with the experience with blindness over twenty years: Today I am a representative of Darkness to the world of light.”

[3] A song from Lalon Fakir

[4] From Pablo Neruda’s poem, “Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca”

[5] From Kattamashai

[6] This is in reference with Meursault, the protagonist in Albert Camus’ “The Outsider” (L’etranger) when he was getting prepared for his final sentence. ‘The Outsider portrays precisely one of those terrible innocents who shock society by not accepting the rules of its game’. Camus himself says about ‘outsider’ in his “Myth of Sisyphus”, “In a universe suddenly deprived of light and illusions man feels himself an outsider. The exile is irrevocable since he has no memories of a lost homeland or no hope of a promised land”.

[7] Casteway

[8] From “Subarnarekha” by Rwitwik Ghatak. In his own voice about the film: “The film not only speaks about the people exiled from the east Bengal… all of us in either ways have turned up to be refugees. This is a much severe problem than a geographical situational problem. In this film, we hear an echo in the character Haraprasad.

[9] From Subala, by Homen Borgohain

[10] Rudranarayan was another name of Vinod Behari. He uses this name in Kattamashai to portray the author’s alter-ego.

[11] A couplet from Rabindra Sangeet

[12] With reference to T S Eliot’s “Love Song to J Alfred Profrock”

[13] Caligula

[14] The horse used by Don Quixote.

[15] “To Albert Einstein”, a poem by Navakanta Baruah