(Translated by Firoz Mahmud Ahsan Shuvo)This city’s got 1 whorehouse
And 1 hermit
1 band of ganja-addicts hang out
Beside the only 1 public urinal
1 creaky, decrepit cinema hall
And 1 intellectual
The babes in bikinis in the poster
The police station opposite the liquor shop
And in the evening he opens up Heidegger
Beside that 4-storied office
Are the illegal Nepalese distillery and the brothel
1 ex-rebel dwells in this city
One who went to prison just for once
And 1 thief, 1 pickpocket, and 1 murderer
Who hate each other for the same reason
1 dwarf comes out of 1 big house
Down from the roof of the jailhouse is sighted the brothel’s
cookery
3 lads climbed its wall and took to their heels
Shot by the police, lies fawned on the ground
1 boy
From whose throat, like that of a beast’s, comes out
a comprehensible groan
The liquor-shop owner gets into a tiff with the police superintendent
Over the latter’s not paying for the liquor
The squabble between the hooker and her client
Between the rickshaw puller and the clerk
Between the elderly mother and her young daughter
Between the beggar and the Providence
Between the constable and the old Nepalese female distiller
Between the milkman and the stale woman
Ceases once it starts
It’s my city, I wander around this city
I jut out my hand and buy Charminar
from
1 betel-leaf store emerging from the mirror
The girl from the Hindi film steps out of the poster
I’ve tasted the shreds of paper from her genitalia
At noon I don’t have a handkerchief in my pocket
Nor even a match-box
My father didn’t have a handkerchief, nor did his father
But my mother had ’em and her mother, too
That is, the handkerchief civilization derives
from
None but women
While sitting on a bench in a liquor shop at noon, I feel like laughing
In which century does the bosom of the rag,
Crammed to prevent the flow during the period, swell into
a rose?
1 madcap from the summit of the city flies his
loincloth
1 syphilis patient with a flag in the grip is well ahead of the procession
1 robot thinks himself to be the future
ruler
1 jerk lies asleep at the time of the awakening of the entire city
1 female professor’s pussy sprouts uneducated
black grasses
and 1 crazy poet squats and starts
peeing
In the small hours of the winter – amid the dreamlessness of the middle class
The girls at the brothel
Burst out into a roar of laughter having seen me
I go for a stroll at noon
1 old woman has had me read the letter of her
bastard son
1 middle-aged woman has had me fuck her
11 year-old daughter who is still not in the business
1 leader has made me do the grocery shopping
for his household
Every single day 1 train
Departs from this city to even a bigger one
Its black smoke hovers across the whole city
Arunesh Ghosh was a poet based in Cooch Behar, India. Firoz Mahmud Ahsan Shuvo is a translator and writer; he teaches English Literature at Khulna University.