An atmic offering

And now, I shall Trudge on.../All alone, in the unending/Plateau of grey shrubbery (The Drift)

Thus begins the anthology of Poems across Time edited by noted cartoonist/bureaucrat/poet Bibhu Acharya with an invocation to the Immanent Force, beneath the Nila Saila (Blue Mountain).

The tagline, ‘One family, three voices’ is important, to assert their poetic genius more than a common inheritance of which they should feel proud. The Acharya family, Bibhu, his elder brother Debi Prasad and his son Anshuman, their versatility spread over space and time, and context too. Bibhu’s 31 poems, DP’s 32 and Anshuman’s 33, in that order, mark a trifecta of the most sublime imagination of thoughts, feelings, reflections within and between them and to the larger world around.

A philosophical dirge to crucification begins this odyssey.

Every time your henchmen/Nail me to the Cross/A muffled sigh goes up/From Someone, Somewhere (Every Day a Friday)

Jesus is crucified every moment in our lives, mundane as they are, growing absurd by the day, thus the essentiality of self-discovery.

And when you discover yourself/Standing out there/In the battlefield/Stripped to your basic elements (Death of Innocence)

And when the day of judgement comes, we look so puny compared to the vast space around us, it is as if we don’t matter as the ego dissolves as a salt doll in the water, in the words of Sri Ramakrishna.

You are thrown out/From the air-conditioned/Prison cells/

Out in the blazing sun/As you stand/Exposed, small and puny/In the merciless, blazing sun (The Day of Judgement)

Bibhu’s poems depict raw emotions, be it longing ‘for my son’ or the emptiness of returning home as an outsider, his journeys through Tibet to Israel and an ode to his partner touchingly brought out.

It is a different matter, though/ That I could not laugh, For I never learnt how to/But cry, certainly I did/With copious tears...(Raw materials)

The poet’s agony and frustration come alive in his prayer to his Maker

I have no grievances/No plaints to make/For you have been so kind to me/Just grant me/One last favour/And sign my death warrant/And let me go...(Last Wish)

But is death the finality?

The bureaucrat in the poet agonises.

I knew, I had lost/Long ago, but/Still kept bashing on regardless/For I could at least/Live as a Prisoner of War! (Prisoner of War)

Reminiscing his trainee days, he muses

Metamorphosed from skinny youngsters/With eyes fired by idealism/Into overweight hypertensive/Pragmatic pen-pushers/With dissipating spines (Autumn Sonata)

Then comes his revered brother Debi Prasad whose verses of melancholy and nostalgia in ‘One with the Ocean’ fill up every corner of the heart as if anything was left unsaid from before.

Starting with a beatific offering to the Absolute Brahman, all-pervading, like Truth itself

In the tumultuous waves of/Brahma’s ocean/Your image you see/In the Ocean itself..Someday you will/Come to be/One with the Ocean/That gave rise to thee (The Ocean).

Poems that remained etched in the miraculously discovered blue diary as on the fleeting life-frame

Life killed me again.../Who knows when and where/It will strike/I am afraid of life/Death is okay/It will strike/Only once/For that/I wanted to die/Tonight (Life)

The poet’s longing for liberation when the soul seeks release

Crushed by time/Splintered, burnt bodies/Fade away/But soul is not erased/ How can I erase my soul? (Missing Soul)

A reflection so poignant that it begins to hurt you

And every time in my/Emptiness is fullness/I have thought of/Passing this void of life/On to your laps/Adding a little more/Flame to the/Fires of the souls../I want to mingle in you/Like a lump of kneaded clay... (Desire of today)

‘Kneaded clay’, the desire to start life anew. Debi Prasad’s sadness and sorrow(he passed very young, at 45) come alive in his ‘poetry of living and loving’ (Full Moon darkness)

The longing for love is insatiable/And turn a little bit/To glance at this lonely man/As you pass by../So that at least/I can see you/That fervent desire/To see you grows and/ That desire/Will never turn to ashes/Even when our bodies die...(Would you turn to see?)

He defines life, ‘Too short to brood, too long to forget” ( Bed tea).

That definition which can be universalized irrespective of place, time, subject and context. And then defining death

Death is not dying/Waiting is..

Death is not painful/Dying maybe.. (the new beginning)

How does a man feel lying on his death bed?

An experiential saga that brooks an expansive imagination.

If they ask/What besides poems/Have you left to the future/Have you lived your/Life in vain/I would reply/All my life/I have loved/And was bruised... (If they ask)

Where nostalgia takes a myriad forms

Over/The epitaph of our coffined/Love/Each tear turns to/Dew/Each dream blooms as a /Rose/And smiles like/You... (Epitaph of love)

Where life folds up into a collage of moments

For me, now/life is a few auspicious/Moments/Their memories/Or nothing at all (Auspicious moments)

And then comes, ‘Mundane to the Monumental’ where the young poet Anshuman (and here two generations speak to each other) situates his arc of imagination

This is probably the place I/let my heart and mind run free...

As the introduction goes, ‘The evolution of a searching mind-from youthful turbulence and existential unrest to gratitude, resilience, and socio-political clarity’.

The poet then weaves a larger-than-life image travelling through places, peoples and ideas. His versatile verses display a profundity of feelings, raw and reflective, anguished at times,his turbulence difficult to decipher, yet easy to understand, connecting with strangers during his perambulation through life.

Every place I go, every person I meet/Another stranger at the dead end of the street/Is a connection I seek, or sought, from the lives past/Fleeting feelings,a chemical romance/And heart hung at half-mast (Gratitude unbound)

And yet a responsibility for love, for a not-yet accomplished journey

A journey that will last forever/A promise that will hold together/A pact to respect one another/A responsibilty to present our best selves to each other (Spring 2018)

A chance encounter with a Uber driver and life’s mystery unfolds as a new voyage heralds.

‘Focus inward, not outward.../I now believed/To do more of what I love, and love more of what I do/Binds the universe in as special glue (A better self)

Sometimes mystery lurks behind hidden meanings as the poet explores

Feel my throat go dry in the middle of the night/Feel my ears buzz with a rip-roaring might/Feel my mind reduce into organic shards/In my world, that’s why it rains upwards (That’s why it rains upwards)

Life imagined as a solitary spider caught in the cobweb of a wayward living, the young poet expresses,

The indulgent rays that are softly shining/Against the cobwebs/Which reflect in peace/For even though it traps and kills/It is still home to that solitary spider (I feel alive)

Meandering along life’s flow, witnessing the endless procession of events, he has sufficiently matured to see the mind as a universe and along the solitary path that he trudges, gives a call to wake up.

Wake up before it’s too late/Wake up before you miss the monumental/And vanish into the mundane

Again a sublime return to the Absolute in cosmic consciousness. Here, I rest my pen.

What all to see/read and bewilder, the thoughts behind these panoply of relational geniuses who have many more verses to pen and many more miles to go, some in this living, some beyond.

Solitude plays up again and again, remembering father, reflecting on the vicissitudes of Gaza, but not melancholic as life offers a panacea to return again and again until the final denouement when the merger is complete and nothing returns.

Verily an offering of the soul, or three souls, like nothing else ever.

(The reviewer is a former Ambassador, poet, writer and columnist)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Malay Mishra

[email protected]