The Monologue of a Surrogate Mother and Other Poems

This baby born today is not mine. Or is it?
This maternity is only for banknotes,
more of which I often get than I bargain for.

The feel of someone else’s fetus growing
tiny limbs over nauseating months
and the baby’s restless kicks inside my womb

are all over in a flash. In the hospital,
while trying to latch the baby on to my nipple,
I felt my tears as if asking for the green-light.

My clients say such sentiments don’t suit us;
they come like locusts year after year.
No, the locusts leave crops fully damaged

but they don’t. They rather leave me
a few more banknotes as a goodwill gesture.
And then the very next year I might have

to do it again, though a bit more hesitantly.
My life’s never been sweet like soan papdi.
My real kids wonder why my belly swells

like high-tide and subsides like water’s retreat;
they don’t know where their siblings go.
Their questions are breakers on the beach.

My husband, either lying face down
or sitting up with amputated legs over there,
is always afraid I might dump him one day.

I still relive the first sight of his bloodied legs
lying separate on the rail tracks. Whatever,
they just need food on the table. No,

not the table for this piece of furniture seems
a luxury even in my wild imagination.
Unlike a hooker, I never get up close

with my clients; so there’s no question
of wrapping my legs around them.
I lease my womb for their test-tube fetuses.

I am a queen of the womb. But last year
I was on the verge of being dead at childbirth;
fortunately, doctors didn’t let it happen,

not for my sake but for the baby I was
supposed to deliver to my rich client. No,
I still remain poor. Like a bitch giving birth

to puppies on busy street-corners?
No, I am more dignified than a bitch living
on leftovers. I am the human mother!

The only thing I get weirdly sad about
is that I never had the chance to be called
Mother by those babies I had given birth to.

In Bengali

There are lots of things I badly need to confess in Bengali
even though serpents twine around my success – in Bengali.

Romantics say you can’t wipe out what’s learned in the womb.
Our chauvinists cry: It’d exactly be told more or less in Bengali.

I’d let my mother’s language float away with the ebb-tide;
yet I’m a mudskipper she doesn’t bother to bless in Bengali.

With my feet on ground, I let a new wind come in through windows.
Does the earlier wind have anything else to express in Bengali?

Someone said every language is a uniform we must wear;
years spent elsewhere doubt if yet again I’d dress in Bengali.

Country folks gape at me; they hang about perplexed for hours
until I speak something epiphanic like Yes in Bengali.

I’m a Jesus, with the cross of being wacky in alien words.
They look contented as they calculate my distress in Bengali.

As lust pushed me into flames Make love to her now or never,
I didn’t have any other option but to undress in Bengali.

I was jilted in love and broke into consoling tears in public.
How would I forget the eruption of my sadness in Bengali?

I swim in other channels; yet nothing feels like home
unless bastards of my clan cheer me or depress in Bengali.

My parents and the ones I now live with are the whole lot.
I wonder if I felt satisfied talking to them ever unless in Bengali.

The country I live in has scumbags around every corner,
say, linguistic chauvinists I’d like to impress in Bengali.

Sofiul, don’t forget your Local Muse who said in a dream:
You’d better not underrate the effects of your caress in Bengali.

No Retirement Age for Worries

You went through long periods of neglect and unfair dismissal.
You know how hill-dwellers light torches and beat kerosene tins

to scare away wild elephants ravaging in the backcountry
and you must regret not having stood up for your own people

and not having ended years of your uncalled-for standoff.
You forgot you would wake up to oxen walking in circles

on paddy sheaves on the front yard, to separate grains
from the straw while vacationing at Granny’s winterhouse.

You could have made an existential breakthrough:
how to be cleared of accusations not excepting one’s amnesia!

After your failed efforts, you broke things with a vengeance,
said unnecessary things in the heat of the moment,

took desperate measures seemingly better than slow torture,
and whipped up the death drive as industrial plants do

to the biosphere without bracing for climate change.
To take the pressure off, you might have gone so far

as to greenlight your foolhardiness to harden as permafrost
and to endorse unfounded narratives and relentless polemics

instead of winnowing out inaccuracies the way threshers do
the paddy grains from the chaff falling apart from the pile.

On a Peruvian tour, you might miss eyeblinks for the Nazca Lines
but the life you see around is no less astonishing.

Whenever your resilience is nearing such a breaking point,
play with news headlines like you did in your early teens:

for instance, the tantrum of “an obese turtle on his back
flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over.”

Remember fireworks won’t be going off forever in the dark
and unfortunately there’s not even a retirement age for worries. 

In the Jungles

On reading Kenneth Anderson

Imagine yourself a big game hunter on a machan,
waiting over the kill of a man-eating tiger
– the scourge of areas bordering a jungle –
unmoved but looking up at stars as if puffed rice
against the dark. You are not hard of hearing
nor poor of sight but profusely perspiring over
your reflexes not as lightning-fast as a hooded snake.
Don’t forget all of what you are depends on defeating 
a man-eater’s cunningness with yours. Imagine

mud glued to your shoe heels in the scorching sun
and damp trousers sticking like your second skin
after a slip on the sludge. At the cow-dust
hour, you see grazing cattle return home from the lush
vegetation on the jungle’s fringe. The villagers’
lifeline is crops and cattle that put a heavy toll
on wild herbivores. Conflicts with carnivores
go out of control; then arrive the hunters –
now a politically incorrect species for environuts.   

Imagine it’s your first jungle night, a very scary
fog-painted night at that. You might have
more than accepted jungle bushes to be alert for –
under which man-eaters crouch and from which
they unnervingly spring. Returning through bushes,
across nullahs and over boulders wouldn’t be easy.
So by a lake, build a fire to stay secure.
After that, enjoy fireflies with birds and bees
as the background music amid ever-increasing fears. 

If Every Disaster Were Just a Bad Dream!

The past is not the well-preserved remains of something
    excavated by archaeologists. Bad situations
were always present in the past as they are now.
For instance, crossings by unaccompanied Mexican minors
rise in the middle of this pandemic, and a North Korean gymnast
jumps the border fence to freedom in its southern neighbor.
The thing we could not otherwise understand
    is that the shock will never be far from over.
With the good and the bad clashing, the area of conflict changes.
It might not reduce your wrinkles but it’s what it always was.

My sadness intercepts its counterpart like a rival aircraft
    when their ties are at a low. No quirkiness for sure.
I badly need something sustainable to lift my spirits
or I must be rolling out sweeping changes in my plan now.
It must be as good as troop pullouts from a war-ravaged country
or a bailout for a cash-strapped government.
But I receive nothing else upfront except consolation
    that stands out among other things under the sun.
Wherever I jet in to, I can’t avoid my wizened face
or pull the plug on my never-ending hallucinations.

Yet life is like uncertainty about an uncertified vaccine.
    It doesn’t give you the terms of agreement; it’s blank there.
Look at it again in disbelief. Nothing can break its gridlock.
Yet it’s not something just moments from the end.
Rather the lust for it might swell like yeast dough.
When I get something long desired, I recall
the happiness of checkered keelbacks with their fangs
    deep into skipper frogs or skinks among hyacinths
in our backyard pond. I also feel ecstatic
about wildlife using sky bridges to cross interstate highways.

You might be reeling from something, and out of necessity
    you must brace for something else yet again.
I balk at the speeches – made by some of its champions –
littered with deliberate lies and half-truths.
Whatever, I don’t subscribe to anyone’s idea
of a nail-biter or a do-or-die though I feel the pressure.
Despite fairy tales being the reality in childhood,
    you continuously weigh in before you get bloodied
in your boxing fights all your life, and there’s no retirement.
Yet art carves a form out of chaos, and I feel good about it.