Spittoon Monthly presents the sensuous lyric of Siddharth Dasgupta, our featured writer for July 2020. Rooted in Istanbul, Calcutta, childhood memory, and language itself, these five poems are both worldly and intimate, generating a rich soundscape where a reader-traveler might sojourn. Following the poems, Dasgupta comments on using non-English words in English poetry, and then Jack Calder unpacks the Freudian bond between cities, poetry, and Eros. If you love what you read, you can support Dasgupta and our editors with a quick share on social media.
The Poems
One Indian City, Two Indian Lovers
Ishq, the word reverberates
Sending ripples
of erotic Blue
Across the naked promise
Of what her body
chooses to preserve
And what her body
chooses to portray
Mizaaj, the mood
Reciprocates
It hovers on the edge
of cliffs drawn
from breath
Each lust left
desiring the
Intensity of you
If desire has a leitmotif
Then let in be the mark
upon her knee
And the exhaled prism
of a single word
Alfaaz
Its two syllables
pouring life into nothing
The freshwater dramas
of ethnic corsage
Laila Rukh
beckoning waves
with a swirl of black
And the nude infidelities
of a word smothered
in mist,
Intezaar…
Istanbul Unto Ephemera | I
But for erotica, what would our cities be? Through the
depths of scorched earth and parched throats, as these
holy desires infiltrate each drop of sky, I take prayer
and burn it into the blush of skin. In Istanbul and I,
this dance of crave and yearn persists—like the mouth
of a lover preserving the coattails of a storm—before
it rises in crescendo and the fervency of youth, hands
held high, beseeching hearts nourished by love and the
poetry in nights of consequence, its collage of Sufi and
fuck me leaving behind a breathless wake. In this city
of bacchanals and bliss, the crackle of earth is only an
invitation for me to succumb to flesh, to the pleasures
of miscreant strands of hair, as they sway and sizzle to
the delirious music of an anonymous breeze, to the
drunken thrill of fresh fragrance on mist, to the orange
dance of days draped in the spray of rhyme, and to the
rough kiss of two lovers hoping against the inevitable
cyclones of hope. An ashen haze of defiance breaches
the air, my soul dreams a mellifluous song, ardour
dutifully penetrates the breath of a reverie, and our
bodies persist with the motion of lovers, as lost to
religion and the vulgar predictability of stricture, as
to our limbs, by now orchestrating a dark love affair
of their own. Stay still, Istanbul, while my desires
culminate in the frescoes of your spires, breathing
fondness and fire on the warm dapple of your days,
merging sin and soul into the initial sigh of couplets,
fuelling the naked blaze of us beneath aged minaret.
Calcutta Unto Chimera | III
But for poetry, what would our cities be? Only through the
words that eluded Tagore’s throat, does rain no longer feel
like rain, but a precursor to a woman’s flood and her inner
desires for the purity of touch. Only through the miscreant
phrases that escaped the great man’s grasp does a flower
no longer represent a flower, but the natural denouement
to monsoon’s unflinching haste. Nothing to say of Ray, in
frames, his stately gait beseeching secrets from the wombs
of the quietly unseen, and of his piercing eyes, in flames,
burning holes through the paradigm of black, white, and
the earth within. Who knew lyrics and words could inflict
the air with the ease of beauty eviscerating what was left
of breath, even as monsoon rushes by, oblivious to the
ghosts of Hayat Mahmud and Maryam Khanum, each
leaving strands of grace across this city’s consequential
myths. Calcutta, isn’t your heart itself film and literary
filament—echoing through corridors long bereft of light;
ravaging lost souls and beautiful lovers equally; bestowing
seraphim and soliloquy through these lingering burns of
Roy and Rahimunnesa; sparring over Howrah Bridge and
its own elegiac sway—beating above a river that surely must
hold the most tragic cadence of all? Idols are being carved
to meter, that which is sublime is being left to stanza, and
qawwals resort to quatrain. Stay still, Calcutta, while this ink
flows across fresh births and long disremembered bones,
stay perfectly still as this poet scours the earth for traces of
a somnolent sky, and as he aches, as he must, for the elusive
consonance resting silently within this fickle notion of home.
Remembering
Rushes, pines,
Streams, and
Bracken. The earth
Never forgets.
A wild supari
Lying cracked
In two—one half
In bloom, the other
Half crushed,
Its life spilt
In rivers of
Ink. Rivers,
Dreams, mahua,
And tides. The earth
Never forgets.
A wild supari
Lying on the
Banks of the
Andaman Sea.
Once it lay
Cracked, now it
Seems entire;
Spilt blood
And veins
Carefully sewn.
Flies, forests,
Trunks, and truths.
The earth
Never forgets. Me,
Summer, bonfires,
And you. The earth
Never forgets.
The earth
Never forgets…
Contrails
When I was a child, I thought the river Cauvery was a girl who could never find her way home; I thought the Indus Valley was a gully filled with flowing rivulets of honey. I thought home was the place where Mum, Dad, and books (Raduga Publishers, Moscow) danced beneath the happy orange and lemon pink blaze of something that I would only later come to know as dusk. Heaven comes unravelling in the blossoming dewdrops of rain; I gulp the showers down like fairytales. I thought rainwater mud was as much a playground as grass, even its name, elongated for effect—keee–chh–add—ripe for whoops of joy and the muffled echoes of a distant neighbourhood parent howling at the skies. Memory fills me like the mouths of slaked earth consuming debris. When I was a child, I thought sadness was the ghost who pokes your skin when you’re beaten up at school for no fault of your own; I thought sadness lingered only in those places where mildew gathered like a stubborn relative, refusing to leave, refusing to breathe. I felt sadness would only come after me if I looked, and that when I ran, its lungs would give way well before mine. Games of cricket echo to the protesting chirps of crickets; blossoms of evasive gulmohar and sprigs of playful marigold cling to the earth like sandwiches for a weekend picnic clinging to cellophane skin. When I was a child, I thought our verandah was as wide as that thing called the Himalayas, its penumbra embracing laughter, sadness, hope, life, uncles, aunties, chatter, dreams, and the trails of curiosity left by Father’s cigarette smoke. When I was a child, I never knew I’d use the word penumbra some day, but I knew the inner workings of humility. It lay in the shy elegance of our home, birthed through the whispered mélange of brick, soil, mud, and faith; it lay in Mum conjuring up a South Indian stew, draped in the finery of dulcet tones; it lay in Father breathing eloquence through the vast garden of his riches—his books—stacked, piled, crammed, strewn, left open, consumed, and memorised, as they were. When I was a child, I thought childhood was the halcyon spring that infiltrates your skin for good, not knowing either the intricacies of life or the pronunciation to halcyon. I figured The Little Prince was a brother of mine, looking down on me from a planet many miles removed; when I was a child, I thought he was envious of my summery skip, while I sat obsessing over his horizons of azure. A chorus or two, the phrasings drift through an ocean of years; a young love or two, left simmering on the edges of hope and other imaginations and such. I’m not sure how to put this, but childhood felt like ripples tossed out on a lake, each remembrance hinged to words that were never spoken. When I was a child, it seemed to me that the whole wide world could be contained, dexterously, within the meanderings of a single poem.
On non-English words in English poetry
Deva Eveland: “One Indian City, Two Indian Lovers” is interspersed with words in Urdu (I think?), which I enjoy as pure sound if I read the poem aloud, but cannot understand. This brings up a few questions. What is your approach in drawing attention to isolated non-English words within a poem that is otherwise English? Would your usual readers understand both? Is the scene perhaps one where the two lovers might be switching languages anyway as they spoke?
Siddharth Dasgupta: With language and the presence of the foreign entity (to the English-speaking reader) among an ocean of English, I tend to go with instinct. With some poems and narratives, I’ll feel that the meaning would be useful, and will have it included as a footnote. With certain poetry, the explanation arrives within the poems themselves. Here, my agenda isn’t clarity, but cadence—the essence, or an abstraction of the essence, is actually serving the rhythmic needs of the poem—a lilt of tongue, the beautiful oddness of foreignness.
You’re right; the words in “One Indian City, Two Indian Lovers” are Urdu. And this plays to when I have absolutely no desire to explain the words. The “why” of it lies in your question itself—so that the reader may enjoy the pure sound of the canvas, unsullied by meaning and context. Of course I’ll try to leave enough clues in the language surrounding the word(s) so that you have a fair enough idea, but even if you get the meaning entirely wrong, there’s no loss really. You’ve tasted the untouched sweetness of it.
I’m not sure who my usual readers are. I would hope that they’d be open to the whims of language though, as with this poem. The dance of dialect then offers playfulness, the dark thrill of not knowing … Even an exhalation uttered as a soliloquy, meant to allay an aroused heart. The lovers here are flirting with the tremors of an intimacy that lives outside of language
Critical Accompaniment
Erotica = Poetry
By Jack Calder
Siddharth Dasgupta’s poems “Istanbul Unto Ephemera” and “Calcutta Unto Chimera” give us the key to understanding his work in their paired first lines: “But for [erotica/poetry], what would our cities be?” The equation implied here is simple: erotica = poetry (in his own words, “Sufi” and “fuck me”). All of Dasgupta’s poetry is a struggle to express this one, quasi-mystical insight.
Consider “One Indian City, Two Indian Lovers,” where words are not just tokens of intimacy that lovers pay one another; poor tools that can only reflect, more or less, the desire that lies beneath. Instead, they have power. Ishq sends out erotic ripples, Alfaaz pours “life into nothing.” Left untranslated, the words reveal themselves as magic. We don’t see what they mean, but only what they do. They are the things of desire, taking its shape in the “exhaled prism / of a single word.”
More, they are desire. “Contrails” demonstrates just how deep this insight reaches. Here we get a sequence of images taken from childhood, as well as a couple interjections which suggest a narrator reflecting from the standpoint of the present (“Memory fills me…”). The images take the form of more equations: Indus Valley = gully filled with honey; childhood = permanent halcyon spring. These are powerful memories, the sort that come to shape a life, that we are always in search of without knowing it. They are “ripples tossed out on a lake, each remembrance / hinged to words that were never spoken.” Poems, words, are no accidental things. They are hinged to experience, even those never spoken, never thought.
In Dasgupta’s best poems he goes even further, describing a vision in which desire is the fundamental architecture of existence. I am reminded here of Freud’s Eros, which he describes as the force which brings us together and sustains us in communities. It is life, love, sex, and it points us at other people, suffusing them with our desire. For this reason Freud argued “civilization is the struggle for life against death.” Dasgupta’s desire has a similar stature. Speaking to Istanbul, he says “my desires / culminate in the frescoes of your spires, breathing / fondness and fire on the warm dapple of your days … fueling the naked blaze of us beneath aged minaret.” It is Eros which has built the cities and which permeates it. More deeply, it is Eros which fills our words with meaning, which drives us to use them to capture experience for the purposes of life.
We penetrate the world and it penetrates us, as in “Remembering,” where two lovers are pictured as a cracked betel nut (called supari in the poem). Split apart, one blooms and one finds “Its life spilt / in rivers of / Ink.” Its sexual force, which for the one leads to blooming, for the other leads to poetry. Later the lovers are reconciled, but only poetically, in memory. The supari, carefully sewn,“now … Seems entire.” Desire, poetry, has made the supari whole—made it truly fertile again. Eros, even when foiled in a particular instance, contains in itself the drive to overcome that failure. This is why “The earth / Never forgets.” In the field of reality desire blooms, and death is only old manure for a new poem.
Siddharth Dasgupta is an Indian Poet & Novelist; he has written three books thus far.
Siddharth’s poetry & fiction have appeared in Kyoto Journal, Poetry at Sangam, Entropy, Litro, Cha, Madras Courier, the Bombay Literary Review, and elsewhere. Off-and-on, Siddharth also dives into elements of travel and culture for a gathering of well-regarded publications—Travel+Leisure, Harper’s Bazaar, and National Geographic Traveler, included.
He lives in the Indian city of Poona, where he is surviving this surreal season via a steady diet of Nina Simone, words, conversations, and the finessing of poetry collection(s), (but no banana bread, thanks).
@citizen.bliss | https://citizenbliss.squarespace.com
A longer version of “Calcutta Unto Chimera” was originally published in the journal Coldnoon.
Cover art by David Huntington
Interview conducted and edited by Deva Eveland
Critical Accompaniment by Jack Calder