Sayan Aich Bhowmik’s I will Come with a Lighthouse weaves for its readers a graceful affective world where themes of absence, loss, separation, and death -- striding public and private worlds together -- dance into intricate patterns of verbal beauty which simultaneously kindle one’s passions and ignite one’s intellect. Published by Hawakal Publishers in January 2022, this slim volume of poems, divided into sections entitled “Longing and Solitude”, “On Love”, “Political Poems”, and “On Writing” is destined to create in the minds of the readers an impression as bright as the warm yellow on its cover.
One of the first things that impress a reader is Bhowmik’s felicitous representation of absence through a variety of images and allusions. This is evident from the opening poem itself which nostalgically alludes to the name ‘Calcutta’ which, of course, has been consigned to the museum of colonial pasts in favour of Kolkata. Befittingly therefore, Bhowmik juxtaposes Calcutta with “empty harbours”, “missing storytellers”, and people “removed… from telephone directories” (11) -- an object which itself is symptomatic of life in the previous millennium before the deluge of smartphones and digital contact lists. In the same vein, he keeps also referring to “small towns which don’t find/a place to rest on the maps” (16), empty streets, “unclaimed letters at the post office” (15) and finally the abandoned house that surrounds the centre of a word. These images operate as stark objective correlatives that highlight an entrenched melancholia at the heart of Bhowmik’s poetics which runs through the entire collection. Therein lie the relevance of the “sad light” (18) that keeps dripping from his stars, the “sad river” (22) that he keeps in a jar, the autumnal stamp collector entangled in brown leaves and such other images that form a “directory of longing” (17).
Quite naturally, these expressions of melancholy and loss often veer towards the spectre of death which keeps appearing in a number of poems. In a poem like “Chessboard” for example, Death walks in as an unexpected guest for whom the speaker keeps the chessboard ready, knowing that all outcomes are likely to be equally miserable because the speaker is caught between the irreversibility of death on the one hand and the unbearability of life on the other. This unbearability, perhaps combined with a degree of self-loathing, again becomes apparent when the speaker states:
At times I see someone like me
made of paper and glass
lying on the sofa.
In the glass I see myself
with the paper he slits my throat. (22)
Therefore, the speaker’s musings on the “remains of the night” unsurprisingly lead to
a simple straightforward act
Like tying the noose around your neck
And kicking the chair. (26)
Such recurrent invocations to death inevitably darken the nocturnal ambiance of the collection which chimes well with the existential angst that many of us can perhaps relate to, especially in this age of the pandemic where so many of us have lost our loved ones or have had to contend with bouts of depression brought about by various factors such as the lockdown, booming expenses, job loss, and much more. So when the speaker states, almost a la Macbeth, “I’m so deep inside the night/that even if I decide to walk on/I might not get to the other side” (25), we can hear in them an echo of the exhaustion and hopelessness many of us have perhaps had to contend with.
This bleakness, in the subcontinent, is often entwined with various traumatic aspects of our history which continue to impinge on our presents with toxic consequences. This is also something that Bhowmik grapples with as individual scars merge with collective lacerations brought about by memories of partition, riots, and besieged populations in Kashmir or parts of North East India. Particularly haunting in this context is the short poem ‘Lunch’ which concludes with the following lines:
In some distant field
a child finds a grenade pin
in his undercooked rice
and bites into a piece of his home. (51)
This line not only operates as a stark reminder of the ravages wrought by insurgency, terrorism, counter-insurgency operations and such but also warns us about the intersections of trauma, violence, and the embattled idea of “home” which at times even gives rise to child soldiers, whether in Kashmir, Afghanistan, or Palestine. Ever since the Partition, almost 75 years ago, the subcontinent has been heaving with such traumatic intersections -- a reality that continues to resonate even today in a political climate rife with CAA, NRC, the talk of illegal immigrants and detention centres, and a vitiating xenophobia which continues to alarmingly corrode the foundations we have sought to cobble together. Bhowmik understands this and his speakers remind us about not only the bloody bookmarks of history but also the violent cartographies which continue to draw blood even today:
I run my fingers all over the atlas
and the tip of my fingers
smell of blood. (50)
This violence of mapmaking also gives rise to a Fortinbras-state full of “plots of land, never too small/ for a new grave” (51) where even an author’s notebook can house a mass burial ground. Given Bhowmik’s acknowledged fondness for Agha Shahid Ali, it is quite natural that Kashmir recurs in these political poems, but alongside that we also find similarly persistent references to places in Bangladesh, erstwhile East Pakistan, which was a part of the undivided Bengal to which belonged Bhowmik’s beloved grandmother, whose memory resonates in poems like ‘Dhaka’ or ‘Pakistan and Hindustan’, among others. One particular image, armed with a haunting use of zeugma, that appears in one of these poems is that of “slicing the country and women into pieces”, which vividly invokes for the readers, not just the horrors of Partition but also the reports of the Gujarat genocide of 2002 when even pregnant women were put to swords. Bhowmik knows that what prompts such barbarianism is not just the weapons that are being used but, more importantly, the discourse of hatred that motivates the men wielding them. Naturally, the grandmother states, “Some yarns were sharper than knives”.
Amid such images of bloodbath, separation, loss and death, what resources does an author rely on to sustain oneself and others? Bhowmik’s answer is a tapestry of love, metamorphosis, fusion and most importantly, the act of writing, of poetic creation. Despite all the nights and the darkness, the speaker reports how the tungsten bulb melts onto the beloved’s moonlight skin, how the sun comes in through 711 windows inside his beloved’s clothes, and how he is able to warm his hands in the beloved’s “bonfire breasts” (41). The alchemic energy of such phrases also translates into numerous other images of transformation as a result of which walls turn into exit routes, a city becomes a river, calendars melt like wax or unruly rivers flow from the folds of one’s dress. Such striking phrases and images actually serve to underscore a poetics of possibility which envisions migrations to Hindustan and Pakistan resembling the organized, amicable march of ants, a frictionless oscillation between Kolkata evenings and Lahore nights and perhaps most tellingly for our times, “a land/ without identity cards” (49) where no one bothers about the distance between a temple and a mosque.
A poetics of such possibilities obviously requires a potent diction that can open those windows of thought and sensibility through which one might seek escape routes from the daily drudgeries of life. Bhwomik’s poems which promise monsoon and courtesan’s songs to a heart devoid of spring, are also remarkable for their innovative and startling diction which either compare immigration laws with hard coffee beans or words from discarded drafts to ghosts of previous occupants (echoing Agha Shahid Ali again) or affirm to us that “A country in exile/dreams in the language of return” (35). It is such words and the attendant visions of love, fusion and transformation that build for his readers a lighthouse to steer them away from the tempests of heartbreak, suicidal angst and vortices of loss. I propose that you read its light on your own.
Abin Chakraborty teaches English literature in Chandernagore College, West Bengal, India. He has been writing for several years and his poems have been published in Indian and International publications such as Café Dissensus, Rupkatha Journal, Muse India, Pine Cone Review, Acumen, Joao-Roque Literary Journal, Kitaab, NELIT Review, Borderless Journal, Setu Magazine etc.He is also the author of the scholarly monograph, Popular Culture, published by Orient Blackswan in 2019. His scholarly articles have also been published in journals and anthologies from India and abroad. His first collection of poems Unlettered Longings was published recently.
He is the editor of Postcolonial Interventions, an interdisciplinary online journal and one of the co-editors of Plato’s Caves, an online platform that hosts an array of poetry, fiction and non-fiction.
