Voices Within: Ajanta Paul

Ajanta Paul is an academic from Kolkata, India who writes poetry, short stories and literary criticism. She is at present Principal, Women’s Christian College, Kolkata. Ajanta has been published in journals and anthologies including Spadina Literary Review, The Pangolin Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Setu Bilingual Journal, The Wild Word, Shot Glass Journal, Verse-Virtual, Poetic Sun, The Statesman, The Punch Magazine and The Pine Cone Review. She was nominated for the Pushcart in 2020.

Trade

I trade 

in stray, obscure thoughts

broken sentences and nascent images

that strive to keep afloat 

in the crowded concourse of vessels

plying the waterways of the mind 

busy in the barter of banalities.

I trade 

in spices from the east

and wool from the west

flavours and warmth from around the world,

in arctic ice

and aromatic rice

besides many other shades of artifice.

I flag off

my flotilla of crafts ferrying dreams

 which, like paper boats in monsoon puddles

return with muddied prow

promising fresh voyages in their whiff

of tar in far off lands

beyond reason's constricting sands.

I engage in

the commerce in affections

on the high seas of traffic

the trade winds buoying my sails

as my boats rove the waves

weathering all storms, mutinies and piracies,

to return with their merchandise of myths.

I trade in

history’s broken wheels

and the ghosts of lost revolutions 

that spill over the sides of Charon’s boat

polluting the natural ecology

of the soul's deep waters

as they flow into the sea.

I smoulder

on the shores of enterprise 

wafting the smoke of propitiation

in rites of ancient ceremonies

and quietly burn

like fragrant incense

in the center of the heart.

***

How Old is Old?

How old is ‘old’?

I feel a hundred years old

within my hard turtle shell

a thousand years of gestation

in the womb of the earth

turns my carbon memories into precious stones

the millennia split my landmasses

into different continents

changing the courses of my age-old rivers

I retract into the first form

of life on the planet,

a single-celled organism

and swirl in intergalactic orbits

thousands of millions of years ago

in relationships adrift in the cosmos

they say you may come within

knocking distance of me this year, that is

eighty hundred thousand miles apart

after how many centuries, I don’t know

but can guess that should a clash, by chance occur

it will be the end of me, for sure,

how old is ‘old’, really?

wizened but not wise, in my containing carapace

I remain light years away from you.

***

Existential Epistles

The days piled up

Like unopened letters.

Barely held before being tossed aside,

Waiting to be slit open,

And lived in the smell of paper,

And the scent of things cut down,

As the sap of ink

Sustained existential epistles,

And adults cursed the cursive hand 

Of fate, while we children fought

For the postage stamps

Of strange, enticing lands

Winking from the corners

Of the discarded envelopes.

***

 

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Setu, February 2022