World Poetry Day 2019: Sampurna Chattarji reads her poem, Ghatkopar to Versova and Back

GLIDE THROUGH the city, artifice, keeping horrors at bay. For minutes too short to count, I am in abeyance. Scarred From without, gutted from within, unblinking façades sealed off From the metro’s criss-crossing shutter-slide motion New-to-me nomenclature, glass-eyed blue-white newness   Short Smooth Disguised Essential   Cold steel cutting through arterial knot. Home-loans shot Into unwary ears, fusillade from armouries of aspiration. Way stations Sold to highest bidders. A dot on a clear-tempered window mistaken For a hawk. Real hawks wheel outside. Mosques gleam Off glass-fronts. Termites consume what continues to stand.   Paint Mould Bamboo Sheeting Superimposition the last mirage. Decay at eye-level, Comfort at face-value. Tanks on roofs, and dishes, washing, Ladders, lanterns, living. No litany can grace this journey From east to west, impermeable shell, so far from feeling Normal. Warned by mechanical voices that terms and conditions apply. Don’t they, always? Here there is no damp, no heat, no fug Of swamp and sewer, no noise except the pinging bullet-point Loans, no harmonica, drummer, yodelling singer, no singing beggar, No blind and desperate eyes swivelling heavenward, no nifty contrivance Of hooks that hover cunning little packs of sweets-n-savouries [imgcenter]

[/imgcenter] To be snapped up for a steal. No Ludo-players, no lady-lovers, no mouth- Movers and finger-strummers. No veggie-cutters and floor-squatters, No card-sharpers and seat-swappers, no heart-to-heart gestures Miming what’s mine will soon be yours. No identifiers by destination, Me Thane, you Ambarnath, no shifting bums making room for yet more   Bums, generous, hanging half-in-half-off in impossible accommodation. No street-fighting biddies, no long-distance buddies, no poshed-up struggling Models posing for hired shutterbugs. No loose long hair flying in the breeze, No breeze upsetting the flow the shutterbugs want, no agents in dandy checked Pants taking the model’s calls, no assistants calling the shots, no instructions   To simulate ‘jo actual hota hai’ by rippling overhead handles in one swipe. None of that jo actual hota hai, no ‘hawa kuchh galat ja rahi hai’ Because there is no wind here wayward enough to go in the wrong direction, No what really happens in this antiseptic world which is not mine, Not yet, maybe never, in which I ride, trapped by my need for speed   Impatient to exit, wondering who else is with me in this longing For the world outside, just outside this capsule which I must leave To revel again in glare and sweat and funk, snarl and din and blot, Drama and consternation, awareness of time and disability, Erosions, histories of heart — ramshackle — scaffoldings of skin. — Illustration courtesy Joëlle Jolivet — Excerpted with permission from Over and Underground in Paris and Mumbai by Karthika Naïr and Sampurna Chattarji, published by Context, October 2018 Also read: Arundhati Subramaniam’s Song For Catabolic Women Kala Krishnan Ramesh’s What the Peacock said to Ganesha about his Brother’s Lovesickness Karthika Naïr’s Line 1