Lopamudra Banerjee (Diaspora Dual Identities)

Lopamudra Bannerjee

Lines Written On The Banks Of Prinsep Ghat

[A postcard memoir/prose-poem, written just after the lockdown following the Covid 19 pandemic, my visit to Prinsep Ghat, Kolkata, August 2022]

“O nodi re, ekti kotha shudhai shudhu tomare/Bolo kothay tomar desh, tomar nei ki cholar shesh”

(Oh you mighty river, I ask you just this, tell me, where is your homeland, your country, is there no end to your fluid movements?)

The wind speaks a familiar language, in a dialect of childlike, primal wants. It hums an old Bengali song, bringing with it waves of remembrances of a soothing masculine voice that swirled and twirled around my girlhood consciousness. The voice, which had then withered away, when I was busy taking in the sweet swelling of foreign tides, only to come back, scampering, smelling inside my mouth, throbbing and falling in turns.

The boats moored to the river banks want to spread their charm and smile a guileless smile, goaded by the melodies of the boatmen who haven’t seen day travelers in the ‘shikara’ (the fancy name they have for the covered boats) for months on end. From my diasporic bends and twists, here I emerge, past all tribulations in reaching the shores of my homeland. I soak in all my heard-earned native dialects, and ask the boatman who moors the ‘dingi nouko’ and his fellow boatmen mooring the bigger boats at the placid shore:

“Bhai, jabe amake niye? Eka jabo, ek ghonta, koto taka nebe?” (Bhai, can you take me alone in the boat ride? How much are the charges for an hour?)

“Ek ghontar teen sho taka, didi, jaben?” (300 rupees it is for an hour, didi, will you go?) One of them reply, and I hand him three wrinkled hundred rupees notes, descending the stairs, as if skipping three different, interconnected lives, and stepping in a new life force, leading to a wide stretch of water, in continuum. He holds my hand, and makes me sit on a brittle wooden plank, part of the boat’s old, unkempt body, and the boat sails along the low tide, albeit slowly, furtively.

In my sojourner mind, traces of the faraway Hudson and Missisipi river dance, continents apart, as if in an idyllic trance, surrendering to the wind-drifts of my native river Ganga, where I find my requiem of gratitude, the mud of the Bengali month of Sravan, my birth month, clinging to my philandering skin. I am the ‘ghorer meye’, the ubiquitous girl of the native soil who has seen the slow deaths of many familiar sights and sounds of decades gone by, only to give way to the quick rising, rebirth of many thirsts and rhythms and cadence of liberation songs. In my sojourner entity housing my long-learnt Bengali lyrics, constructed, deconstructed, the river bank reads my torn crust and core, deciphers the new, germinated body and its vagrant lores.

“E kool bhenge o-kool tumi goro/jar e-kool o-kool dukool gelo, tar lagi ki koro?” (You break up, you demolish one shore to build another with so much effort, but what can you offer to the one who has lost both his shores?)

With jabbing words of the remembered lyrics, I sail along, diving in the buoyant, melancholy nuances of the familiar river song. The early morning welcomes me with the first streaks of the mellowed sun as the truant clouds overshadow the sun, we cocooned in its shaded, dense canopy of cloudburst. In the pandemic-stricken body of a drizzling city, woken up from the hibernations of two consecutive lockdowns, the morning walkers get boisterous all over again.

I wax and wane in the glory of the rising sun and the early morning, in the hide-and-seek of the light and darkness of the river Ganges, in the daily paraphernalia that promises a gust of remembered wind, in the honking of the cars and buses at the other end of the spectrum that promises the onset of a day that is to start, faltering and fumbling around the turns and bends, yet ready to plunge headlong.

Dingi nouko: Canoe or small boat

O nodi re, ekti kotha shudhai shudhu tomare: An old Bengali song by famous singer and composer Hemant Kumar

Lopamudra Banerjee is an author, poet, translator, editor with nine solo books and six anthologies in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She has received the Journey Awards (First Place category winner) for her memoir ‘Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant’s Wayward Journey,’ International Reuel Prize for Poetry (2017) and other honors. Her poetry has been published in renowned platforms including ‘Life in Quarantine’, the Digital Humanities Archive of Stanford University. Her collaborative poetry collection with Priscilla Rice Titled ‘We Are What We Are’ has been 1^st Prize Winner at New York Book Festival 2024 and her translation work ‘The Bard and His Sister-in-Law’ (Black Eagle Books, 2023) has received Honorary Mention at Paris Book Festival and Hollywood Book Festival 2024.

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Setu, April 2025