Voices Within: Purabi Bhattacharya

Purabi Bhattacharya lives and works in Gujarat. She has a Collection of poems Call Me (2015) published by Writers Workshop India. She is in the panel of book reviewer for Muse India. A Shillong born, she continues to live in her NRC- free hiraeth, wandering with the clouds, cascading with the waterfalls, hounded by butterflies and poets of eminence alike.

Still undulant

 Dear me,

 how does it feel to be and be not
 in love and out
 forty,
 forty one
 fifty times still undulant
 from hills to plain lands
 to run into wild, wilder scrolling eyes
 hit by
 pedestrians, car drivers on sixth gear
 nature lovers, least to forget, self-acclaimed photographers. Giving away
 in charity the happy lost gaze, the most natural thing
 inhaling west wind, resplendent
 with ache cells
 wanting to be left caressed
 twisted, tousled
 left a woman, sponged
 in
 span
 inebriated.

 How does it feel
 smoking in and out
 successive hyperboles

 and then

 going through

 one after another
 miscarriages

 of belief
 of lines after lines
 of infant poems
 out of shape
 and left with
 lump of trials and triumphs
 in temperate times.

Harvest bonfire


It is only fair to give up chasing georgette thoughts
you know would soon branch off
into veldts or may be into the desert dunes
burn to ashes, in buxom summer.


Soon it’d fill in somebody’s script
lose its sacred strands
with every readers gaping eye, it’d soon become
swear of the town.


Why not place greying thoughts, bile, fear,
fatigue, grief in the mind plate
and let chronic dreariness be
fed to the bursting fire of harvest bonfire.
 breathe out:
 dum spiro spero[1]
 dum spiro spero
Mock smoke
 (for Shillong)

i am often taken to a city, still dark, waking up to heavily sleepy
rain slitting morning. You miss the sound of the church bell too.
Everything is as sluggish as the last winter mornings
with very few to brave December gloom
streets get wider. Those countable commons
take a downcast stroll up and down the hills, waiting for spring
let out mock smoke. Sometimes succulent dreams are better inebriants.

Ajit Das & co.


 the Bauls
always untwine the mystery
but just before they do that
they split your head into two
feed you the taboo
 flesh-bone tale
 and not a thing less not more.
 Here begins their invocation
their celebration of both life
and its shredding


ascetic, ecstatic
around fire, ashes
skulls, incense
local made alcohol
 Radhe Krishna
 Radhe Krishna
and they sing…
to wake you up
from a lifelong lull

and they whisper to you: “night is beautiful, baba!
 let it exploit you!”

wall to wall

migratory birds break into the hiatus
of a day- parting sky. In perfect
beat breathing, flapping,
leaving dreams scattered in their trails.
Exquisite. Exhibitive. Carrying
the collection of the day. Nothing
rigmarole. I stand at my terrace
anticipating, with a net spread
to count on my blessings, if any.
The house has already been
dark and death cry evenly distributed
wall to wall.
It is the cry of an overgrown embryo, a widow
lying in memory bag and leitmotifs
for seventy-five years
the world has wronged her, and the desert
spider has found a hideout upon her back.
This winter a bunch of banana trees
cover the viewing. It disconnects us
from our distant hiraeth. These bunches
solemnly picket our unassembled thoughts too. In all
of these and more, my empty days look for ink.



[1] Latin: while I breathe, I hope!
Voices Within - Complete List of Poets :: Setu, January 2019

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