Setu 🌉 सेतु: Samrat Sengupta

Samrat Sengupta

I am not Bangladesh

Though my forefathers left the country some years back,

It was 1947 and like many

My grandfather took his unroofed journey

From Bikrampur.

Names like Khula, Faridpur, Barishal formed

The unread milestones of my growing up.

We have always looked up to an Hilsa

From the other side of the river

To help our appetite.

Criticizing lack of taste of 'this side' we live,

I certainly cannot still be Bangladesh

Where brothers were butchered in 1971

For using a language which I wanted to leave,

I love my English

Just the way I love my continental and homegrown Chinese.

I love my dingy lanes of Kolkata

While hearing stories of traffic jam in Dhaka,

And it is the nature of a global city.

I always wanted to revisit my desh,

To have the taste of fishes and easily available

Foreign goods that pile its market now.

I have also heard of Bangladeshi garment workers -

Their toil and poor pay

But I don't usually interact with such poor people in my own land India.

Geographically I love my globe just as I love my India,

I feel for the poor across borders

I feel for the unemployed, poorly paid, the raped

And the mutilated across history -

They make me a good liberal to speak for humanity.

But even then I cannot become Bangladesh,

Padma and Ganga cannot still be the streams of tears

Flowing from my eyes as the poet says...

I feel for Azaad Kashmir, I feel for massacres in

Orlando and Paris, I feel for Bastar and Chattisgarh,

I feel for what American soldiers did

In Abu Ghraib.

I may also feel for the brutalities in Syria

And turn my face away from the graphic violence

To watch a film instead on massacre of Jews in Germany.

Yes I feel for Vietnam, I feel for Iraq, I feel for Gaza being

Bombed out from the map of the world.

Yet tears choke when a storm deflects to my erstwhile desh,

A slight smirk appears absurdly on my lips

To remember what I have narrowly escaped,

What we have been escaping narrowly

For all these years.

I cannot weep for a country which connects me through language!

I cannot weep for a nation which fought for my tongue!

Last leaf of winter has fallen -

Bludgeoned bodies pile in the exception of my history -

The ghost of my grandfather escaping barefoot

Like thousands in that country who wait in transits

To be transported to Saudi or Singapore

Or at best to the dreamland of America.

The forgotten flesh I shredded with my independence

Comes to haunt my midnight.

I cannot be Bangladesh.

As closer relatives die unmourned we cannot

Perform their last rites - we live in melancholic endlessness.

The nightmares that flicker in sleep

Cannot cover my face in social media.

I can be one with the rest of the world

I can speak for my country and its people

As they form a part of my third world experience -

Very close to where I live millions live without a world

Being striked out from the domestic book of calculations

Where I love to erase

Last week’s expenditure into silent unremembrance.

Setu, July 2018

Samrat Sengupta

I am not Bangladesh…

Samrat Sengupta