SWAPAN SUMARI:::THE CENSUS OF DREAM
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Transcript of SWAPAN SUMARI:::THE CENSUS OF DREAM
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THE CENSUS OF DREAMS
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THE CENSUS OF DREAMS
Amitabha Dev Choudhury
Translations by Arjun Choudhuri
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Swapna Sumari
A Series of poems in Bengali by
Amitabha Dev Choudhury with translations into English
of the same by Arjun Choudhuri.
2011
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, , &-5 0361 2451586, 94350 10632
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ISBN 978-93-80382-62-3
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THE DREAM PRINCE 12
THE INVISIBLE SIGN
16MALEVOLENT CONNIVANCES 18
AT THE END OF A DELUDED PATH 20
RESTLESS SHADOWS 22
THE DARKNESS OF ENVY 24
YOUR VENOMOUS SMILE 26
CHINA LODGE 28
THE LOST DIARY 30
THE OWNER OF THE RIVER 34
THE HOUSE OF THE MOON 36
HOUSES-YES-AND-NO 38BURHA ALI 40
THE FRAGRANCES OF CHAMPA 42
THE WORLDS OF THE CONGENER 44
UNCLE HUGGER-MUGGER 46
THE SCARECROW 48
THE TENANT 50
THE THIEFS MOTHER 52
THE LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION 54
GOD AND THE LUNATIC 58
THE ESSENCE OF THE COUNT 60.....
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FOREWORD
It happens more than often like this.
It happens more than often like this that a person born to become
a politician ends their life as a big shot at a university. A person,who would have been a petty businessman otherwise, becomes
a lumbering scholar of sorts, apparently learned and erudite. A
man who dreamt of becoming a crime detective ends up as a
living corpse that is eternally denied its last sacraments.
It happens more than often like this that a man who wanted to
grow up and write crime fiction ends up labouring his days from
pillar to post as a nose counter beneath the glaring sun and thesearing rain when in every ten years the time comes round for
the great periodical census to begin. And his lengthening, ever-
faceless shadow learns it the hard way that to become a
detectives assistant is not everybodys cup of tea.
Because each human being is an entire story by themselves. Each
human being is actually an endless enigma, a ceaseless mystery.
And because Man in his lifetime is so mysterious, therefore every
corpse is also an eternal mystery.
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I AM THAT DREAM-PRINCE
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THE DREAM PRINCE
When I grow up, I will become the Dream-Prince.
Mark what I say, evening-some jongleur,
you boatmen off the far-off banks of the Barak,
and you who drive on the road now,
heed my words, never in this life shall I touch
that wretched steering wheel.
When I grow up, I will become the Dream-Prince.
But then, dont you go a-telling this
to them, its a secret, mind you.
For if you do babble, my lot
will be an unreadable slap on the cheek.
Whats more, my fame as a wastrel will spread,
and the motherless, benighted child that I am,
I will drift away far from the shore.
When I grow up, I will become the Dream-Prince.
I shall write murder mysteries.
Such murders they will be that my name
shall spread even into the nether regions.
They will queue up night and day
at this shop with your names, O charioteer of Partha
or at this bookstall named Kamala.
Schoolboys will queue up, as will my friends of now,all ranging around in breeches, only that Gouranga
will be in his trousers; the darkest recesses of his pockets
will now and then yield a battered cigarette or two.
Those stilled screams emanating from the lines in the book
will rush on, towards the softened, singed flesh of the candle
held captive by the sharp edge of the assassins metal weapon.
When I grow up, I will become the Dream-Prince.
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And then one day, in one sunburst,
Hashidi the lovely will come down
to buy my books, her braids dripping
with fairy tales, her virginal thighs
sounding a strident challenge
to even the most hardened murderer.
That day, when the lovely Hashidi will buy my books,
I will burst into the Radio Saloon for the first time
and ask for a shave, which will be my first one as well.
The detectives assistant shall, of course, I am sure,
deduce a mystery or two from the beard cast offduring those polished nightly dreams.
And all those dreams I now re-read in these grown days,
I sniff for a whiff or two of those naphthalene scents.
And I find that a certain Dream-Prince yet lives
with his pains and agonies of having not become
the Dream Prince.
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THE INVISIBLE SIGN
The sign is invisible. Only its memories drift near, and nearer still.Hashidis bedroom. The wastepaper basket. And among them all,
a sliver of paper that is still readable: Go to the bower
in the dead of the night. All else was known to the master,
and to the nightly Bombay Mail, two of whose seats lay emptied
that night, till many a station had passed by.
A nameless flower rears its head in amazement
from deep within the roadside crevice on the Silchar-Jowai route .
Its transient smile has been reddened yet more
by the mingled blood of two bodies that nourishes its roots.
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MALEVOLENT CONNIVANCES
When I try to read the pages
that the malevolent fog has almost concealed,
I discover a strange blood stain in the waiting room at Silchar.
But the murderer is steadfast in a Shakespearean dilemma
while the crime reporter keeps a vigil at the news desk
awaiting the hard news of some violent homicide.
The malevolent fog
has no title inscribed onto the cover it creates.But the authors name I manage to decipher somehow,
it is the Dream Prince.
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AT THE END OF A DELUDED PATH
When they say that all paths suffer delusion,there rises a counter argument, that simply says
that there is no path that is actually deluded.
This is what that writer of detective stories thinks,
that writer whose pen has run out of ink,
that writer whose deluded detective,
having indicted the wrong man,
is now on his way to end his life.
That writer has but one course to seek:
Accept his error and discover another way to take.
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RESTLESS SHADOWS
At night when I go off to sleep, my shadowcreeps out through a chink of the closed door.
When I dream of Hashidi, my shadow
kisses her smiling cheeks in the dream.
I wonder who she thinks of, then?
Is it Pranoyda?
But my eyes are more beautiful than his!
I dream of Nasus garden and of the gathering
that is conjured there with our illimitable songs.
My shadow then tears off blossoms
in Nasus garden, peeling off even
the veins of the leaves, leaving me so hapless.
The detective concluded: Do one thing.
Try to dream of only your own shadow,
do dream, but only of a shadow
that is your own and not anybody elses.
Then, and only then will you be ableto confine it within doors. Only then
can you save your own future.
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THE DARKNESS OF ENVY
The man who was killedwas envied by everybody.
Nobody among them
can be distinctly keyed out.
The failed detective
has a sudden thought:
What a wonder is it that
Man has not invented
an instrument to measure
this inimitable darkness!
Even when so much has been
thought and measured out
for the growth of civilisation.
If there had been something like that,
then we would have surely seen light.
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YOUR VENOMOUS SMILE
Your smile drips deadly venom, which is whyfour of your lovers have dropped dead, one by one.
The poet however knows, his sleuthing heart is therefore
fraught with a series of eternal queries, his skies
are covered with birds of carrion in flight.
Poisoned, the smiles in our lives have died, one by one
in the gathering dark. And that is perhaps why,
I remember you, O venomous one, and your questions,
and the agonies of the one whom you never graced
with even a single smile; all of it I do remember.
He could have ornamented you, if he would,
with the fair weight of innocence.
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CHINA LODGE
China Lodge It waits with an air of melancholia
for some murder to happen.
Thirty long years it has been
since it last tasted blood, that was
when it had been young.
But the ownership has not passed,
only a new facade has risen,
concealing the passage of days.
Those wild, repressed streaming nights
come back as memories,
those shivers, those adventures,
those shadowy crawlings
up the stairs to the terrace party.
In the corner there, two shadows
mix and mesh like a dense undergrowth.
The fainthearted Bengali proprietor looks for some promoterbut in vain, since promoters want plots on the road, not inside
this lane within lanes. China Lodge waits endlessly therefore,
its solitary, lonely heart dreaming in the dead of the night
of some secret murderer who has not even been born yet.
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THE LOST DIARY
That diary is lost, and the daily quest for itsettles down, pullulating secret, silent, deep
into another diary, whose every page
keeps playing a blind strain; it is my agony.
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2.
THE CENSUS, BURHA ALI
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THE OWNER OF THE RIVER
The village knows that it will soon happen, the head count.Papers in hand, the baboos will wander from door to door:
What is your name? How many family members here?
You are a farmer? Children? How many bulls for the plough?
What lingo does the mind weep in? What wild cant
do you emit in the termite hour of coitus? And neighbours?
Do they keep any arms? Your parents were they of this country?
Know the barbed wire? Havent you ever silently cursed the gods
when you looked up at the skies? Whose is that boy?
Hope he is not a hermaphrodite or something like that?
Dont hide anything, will you? Or else I might just lose my job.
I would say: I am just the owner of a river or two.
All those stars that float across the rivers surface are mine.
Bulls I have none in the house. Only a wife
whose fate has decreed for her a single meal everyday
besides the regular hunger for the rest of the time.
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THE HOUSE OF THE MOON
Yes, my boy. Its only the two of us, old women, in this house now.People call it the Moons house. There used to be seven sons,
the fiery disease that eats up all insects took them, and since
revenants belaboured them a tad bit too much in the village,
they left, six of them, for distant lands, on the wings of a dream-plane.
Once in six months or so, their wives make calls here, all long-
distance.
If they had been here, the head count would have been full-of-the-
moon, surely.
The father of these six, our only brother he was, would seize his staff
in fury when he heard the mention of America. But then again,
the year Glasnost happened, he left with his eldest son
with a pain in the left of his aged chest; he lives there now.
I hear that his name has an apologetic vote even now during elections.
But the seventh son was lost to the blows of the police.
That girl keeps alive his dream even now, oars in hand.
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HOUSES-YES-AND-NO
In the Yes-House we live, the three of us, my son, my wife and me.In the No-House, it s not three, its not even complete, none
even the house is not so, the mahajan knows himself,
its his hire I live by, labouring my body through half the day.
The rest of the time I am a sharecropper, half of the time,
and the money that is all, is lost in useless toil awry.
Am I a complete man? Or is it that the baboo is half a man?
My son had to leave school, and since a burden of debt
have I gathered, he labours the same way in the same routine.
The son is mine but has not become mine entirely, my wifeworks herself to her death in this household, and that, and that.
So what does it all amount to? How many live in this house?
One-and-a-half and then one-and-a-half again,
I tell you so, my breath and stomach reeking of arrack.
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THE FRAGRANCES OF CHAMPA
Beside the winding fields of grain lies this crushed shed.Alone in this lonely shed waits this cigarette-boy.
Never has he wafted clouds of smoke. Sometimes
he does chew on betel leaves with tobacco or catechu,
when he lifts his Champa onto the carrier of his bicycle
now lying beside him, that wondrous winged steed,
and flies away with the flowing breezes into the far-off skies.
He lives all alone. In the shed does he pass his nights.
For his food, he pays a few bucks to the old lady
whose house lies beyond the fields just there.There, in that house does he bathe and eat and shit.
His mirror hangs alone in that shed.
His cosmetics, daydreams and other things sundry
wait in this shed only. One day when he will become
a householder, he will fashion a hut here, he thinks
a house billowing all around with his Champas fragrances.
Land? None at all. A scooter is much more necessary.
Where else would his willowing Champa hang on if not?
He said, put it down in your papers, two people live
in this shed now, one is the trader here and the other
is the bunch of his dreams which are fragrant like Champa.
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THE WORLDS OF THE CONGENER
A census is not actually a census but a spate of listenings of stories and tales, the one who narrates all this
is quite unknown; he is a stranger who is very familiar.
That voice seems to be my very own voice as all through
the counting I gaze on the stunned visage of the congener.
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UNCLE HUGGER-MUGGER
The maps are dark. Why is there no light on the maps?The foolish census-baboo from the L. P. school sees
the immediate need to visit the eye specialist
in this nightly guttering of the candle. Or else,
this darkness of his will gorge on the maps.
In this maddening night as he tries to draw it all,
why can he not glimpse the faces of those heads
he counted, those three-hundred-and-fifty-strong?
Why does his wretched life spread itself out
over and over again across the maps he draws?
Only Uncle Hugger-Mugger knows, it seems,
why there are so many, so many and yet so many houses,
which become headless ghouls even before the last lines are drawn?
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THE THIEFS MOTHER
How many souls?
These two.
And another one?
There. Asleep.
At this hour?
Because of daily
unearthly hours.
But why?
To fill the stomach.
How?
Wont say.
Whats that
supposed to mean?
The night knows.
And this day?
It passes
with the need to know.
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THE LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION
Descended is Man of hunger, not of language,I lose my argot in the maws of the sirkarwhose breed
grows as they feed, and so do the people too, while
in my household, even salt is a fierce scarcity.
Every decennium, baboo, do come to my house
and walk around, and then write it down how
the Bengali language is not for me, sometimes
it is to be Assamese, at others it is even Hindi.
This nay and aye the worthless poet strings
together in end-rhyme. The tallying of starvation
will never be mine, yet you read on, and on,
apparent tidings of that out aloud for me to hear.
If someday I learn that poets language, it will be
that I shall have learnt the words of that language
as part of my soul, my body; this life thus speeds on,
then and then on, towards a love for the language.
And then also, it might be thus I will have become
some clapped prisoner lonely in gaol, or a cemetery,
being berated by them, being told that the language
I speak would have to be discarded momentarily.
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GOD AND THE LUNATIC
Far off from the census-work,a lunatic sits alone, counting
the moons light on earth.
The moon emerges in a burst
from that moon-struck madcaps eyes.
And so emerges a repressed ego,
for in this hamlet only he knows
the tales of the stigma that God bears.
Therefore, he converses with God all alone,while all the others are devotees, this madcap
liberates God all on his own each day, and
frenzies himself every night with Him
in a delirium that encompasses the firmament.
To the west of the village lies the idol-less temple.
That has been the madcaps secret haven
for so many days now; none approach for fear
of being pelted. The census-workers helpless wait.
They know that they would have to count two
if they would count only him. Democracy too
is incapacitated here, the madcap and God
together create a secret party every night.
THE CENSUS OF DREAMS
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THE ESSENCE OF THE COUNT
O great One, Lord of the road,I weave my paths around you
in this unearthly hour to see
if the productions of men are still
the same going-on. O God,
men pullulate on and on, no road
for them now anymore.
The one infringes on the other,
land, head, shoulders and all.
A remarkable inertia it isthat shrouds this vast noonday.
Such is it, imagine, that the other man
knows even the bloodied sigh
of the post coital moment.
All fences fail. No space, no perimeters.
Therefore observe, in this road and that
how the teeming human habitats grow
without any room for a breather, no road
is now true, Lord, one path meshes itself
into the other, hurriedly, in dire want;
the road, for one, gorges on itself.
Lord of the road, having come here
to work the census, your untimely farewell
I have glimpsed and now it is that I,
leaving aside those wounded, corrupt paths,
those eternal paths wrought by so many feet,
I have climbed onto the highway.
The high ones swarm on the highway.
But you, Lord of the road, are dead.
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