The words from my mother’s language are failing me these days. I need the language of birds, deer, peacocks, cows, goats. I need to borrow the alphabet from the trees, air, water, river, mountain, land, unnamed flowers, fireflies, crickets. But they are dying. Do the dead have a language too? Do they have words? I do not have to go in search of death; it visits me every day. Death of the dispossessed. Death caused by starvation, famine, flood, deforestation, decimation, discrimination, bulldozers, bombs. But I am left empty handed. The dead have no voice, no words. They only have a smell, like that of hidden sins. An all-pervading smell that no one talks about. But now this smell cuts across the masks that we have been wearing to protect us from a pandemic. And unable to tell my stories I am dying. My search for the language does not end and I write some broken poems:
Jalpaiguri, West Bengal
|THU, SEP 25, 2025
The language of the fish, frogs and a few fractured poems
A poet mourns the loss of language that comes along with many other losses of lives, livelihoods, climate, and a world as we knew it once. All at the altar of greed and power
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1. Where did the fish go?
We want more, more
devastatingly more,
more without limits,
more - the infinite.
Where did all the fish go?
Bishnu - the last fisherman of his clan
sees ponds in his dreams
and every night
he walks to the high-rise apartments
and curses them.
He keeps his ears to the ground
hears the trapped fish under the buildings,
dying of eutrophication.
He pushes the pillars off until his hands begin to bleed,
and he feels hypoxemic.
In the morning, passers-by find him dead.
No one cries for a mad fisherman.
To be cried upon
one needs to be high on the class hierarchy
Bishnu has none.
No one cries,
only in his hand, he has two fistfuls of sand.
2. The broken ecosystem and the dead vultures of my village
Hisss hisss hisss…
We are the broken grammar
You needed milk,
you fed your cows diclofenac
You broke the sentence:
Eco-system.
Now we're all dead
and you are stinking like us
Decomposed bodies of cows
Follow your memory of the smell
Who is dead? Who is dead?
Grammar - Sentence - Ecosystem?
Rest in stink brothers.
(The chorus of the dead vultures stops)
3. Where did the frogs go?
The midnight moaning
and the creak creak of a decaying
mango wood cot and
the croaking of the frog for a she-frog -
we lost all in our lust for good days.
The tired soul of jobless pursuit
and empty stomachs
are listless in early morning's pleasure.
The cot has lost its skeleton.
The frogs are all dead.
The rains are fermenting more foams
of pesticides.
In the basti of a megacity
the door of a damp shoddy room
is unlatched still,
Zamila's eyes are vacant and droopy.
No customer these days.
Her mother has turned her gaze
away from the sky,
a dark cloud hovers in her eyes.
4. The tree as a witch
They deemed the blackboard tree
as a witch.
They first cut down its wings
and then danced around it.
They feasted upon body
and then burnt down the trunk,
the legs, the seeds, the ovaries.
They were done.
Upon returning home they killed
the woman too.
The woman who asked questions
about the tree, the vultures
and the tongues.
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