ছায়া - মানব
-----------------
সবুজ সরকার
প্রতিটি দুঃসময় ভাগ করে দেয়
দেশ, সমাজ আর মানুষকে ;
যেন জন্মদিনের কেকের ওপরে রাখা
সুদৃশ্য ছুরি !
মডুলার কিচেনের শৌখিন বিরিয়ানির আহ্লাদী ঘ্রাণ
পাড়া ছাপিয়ে হেঁটে যায়
বস্তির সিংহদ্বারে।
সেখানে শাঁখের করাতের বেসাতি,
ছায়া- মানব আঁকে জীবনের আলপনা,
পরিযায়ী পদশব্দ স্বপ্ন লেখে সুখী গৃহকোণের।
ইমিউনিটি এক মিষ্টি উৎপাত।
অভিযোজন
--------------------
বাতাসের রং নীল
অদৃশ্য বিষে-বিষে বন্ধুতা।
পরিযায়ী গান ঘুম ঘুম হেঁটে যায়,
হেঁটে যায় ক্লান্ত মফ:স্বল;
ঝিল,
পরীদের রূপকথা
লেখা হোক এই অবেলায় ।
সেক্টার অফিস, ভোট বাক্স
ভিভিপ্যাটে হোক বীজ বোনা
আগামীর রঙিন ভবিষ্যৎ,
মাঝে শুধু স্বপ্ন স্বপ্ন খেলা
রক্ত নিয়ে হোলি
মুখ ঢাকা বাসন্তী পুজো
মুখ ঢাকা প্রেম
শুধু কথা হোক চোখে চোখে।
-----
Sabuj Sarkar**
Confinement by force is
troublesome, but confinement by choice is liberty. It may apparently surprise
someone but the more one goes deep into it, the veracity of the statement
becomes translucent. When you choose confinement for your own sake, you just
make the best of it. You open up all the hidden doors of your psyche which
remained so long bankrupt only because you didn’t have the luxury of free
thinking. If the job you do is not out of passion but for pecuniary purposes;
it actually kills your spirit in the name of salary.
The history of
confinement is never new. Two thousand years ago Xihan dynasty of China
inaugurated the postpartum confinement in the name of “zuo yuezi” or “sitting out the month” 1. Confinement in
the name of imprisonment could be seen in the ancient Mesopotamia. The code of Ur-Nammu in ancient Mesopotamia records, “If a man commits
kidnapping, he is to be imprisoned and pay 15 shekels of silver.” The codes of
Hammurabi 2 were in no way less innovative. But it was a fact proven down the ages that
confinement in the name of punishment cannot heal an individual, neither can it
be benefitted for the state. Confinement in the name of punishment leads one to
religion and spirituality even. And the biggest example in this regard is a
stone tablet of 723 AD of Tang Dynasty in China in which Buddhist temples were
close to the prison houses to rehabilitate the prisoners for a better life and
understanding ameliorating past misdeeds. In the history of human civilization,
men of wisdom had often been the victims of solitary confinement as they were
nothing but threats to the society. In Plato’s Crito, Crito’s suggestion3 to Socrates was to escape
from prison and a moderate amount of money could settle the dispute. The
Mamertine Prison of Italy diarizes how confinement meant for waiting of an
approaching death in ancient legal system of Rome.
Confinement has its own
turquoise colour with a soothing effect. It is the personality of an individual
that makes confinement vibrant. Confinement sans threat of death makes one feel
that life is not linear rather multifaceted. It puts one in introspection and helps
to dive in surprising himself with some lovely gems that he was possessing so
long without knowing. Confinement without punishment is a joy; a self
discovery. It is an opportunity for those dreams, those hidden talents that he
hardly could think over only for the lack of time. “fugit inreparabile tempus4”, so said the venerable
Virgil, means “it escapes, irretrievable time” . Confinement comes with a
makeover, a complete sea change honing the skills often unnoticed.
Confinement by choice upholds
creativity as the murky sky often yields a fresh shower and in both cases it is
helpful to resuscitate the mind. For creative minds isolation is an elixir. The
train of ideas can keep a mind busy with thoughts but is hardly effective to
reach its desired goals. Journey can conceptualize a thought, confinement
engineers it. For it was no other than Blake to remind us, “He who desires but
acts not, breeds pestilence5.” Proper utilization of a conditioned
confinement can be best found in Boccaccio’s Decameron during the plague in 14th century
Florence. So was Shakespeare in the
early 17th century, very productive, during the spread of bubonic
plague in England and wrote King Lear,
Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra when London was locked down and the theatre
houses were closed. It is said, Isaac Newton during his quarantined period in
late 17th century was so creative to think afresh the theory of
gravity when the country was hit by another threat of bubonic plague and as a
student of Cambridge University he needed not to attend the classes. Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flue is
one of such evidences that encapsulates the mood of the ailing painter Edvard
Munch with thin hair and a pale face and he continued to paint more on this
theme during and after his recovery from the Spanish flue.
Confinement by choice
is the gift of God, a self imposed journey towards success. Paul Gauguin’s secluded
life in the island Tahiti is an artist’s devotion to his art. Milton’s agenda
to lock him in for years after his studies in Cambridge is a preparatory ground
for a larger leap. Confinement is concentration. Getting accessible to everyone
and for everything is distraction. Arthur Miller’s magnum opus Death of a Salesman is the result of a
self imposed confinement. That is true also in the writing career of Earnest
Hemingway. The Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro has a similar philosophy of life.
He simply locks himself up even from his family members and goes on writing
novels. Every creation is a magic. It demands a sound mind and a systematic
organized life style. A creative mind in distractions is far away from his
creations.
Covid-19, a pandemic in 2020, put
the whole world in threat. While killing millions across the globe and leaving
the rest in quarantine and in social distance, Covid-19 became phenomenal
raising certain issues of human existence on earth. Life before and during
Covid-19 was remarkably different from one to the other. The maddening liberty
of roaming everywhere stopped suddenly. People became deranged. They started to
adapt themselves in this new scenario, but the rate of impatience grew up
gradually. It became more and more prominent that human being is impatient by
nature. And to minimize this impatience, they can do anything. They can dance
until their leg ache begins. They can cook food until all the members in the
family are overburdened with a protruded belly. They can write poems lines
after lines and posting them on the Facebook and social media when no one is
left with any more power to go through them on the screens.
If we put these jokes apart,
Covid-19 was, for a section of the society, a boon in banishment. It is true,
lovers could not meet face to face for months, but they wrote beautiful poems
for one another that they hardly could do before while enjoying snacks in an
evening restaurant. When parks were no more available to the kids, they took
shelters in the cartoons on the screen, and when they didn’t find anything new
in them, they started recitations, dancing on the roof and receiving accolades
from the neighbouring roofs, making origami and clay models and reading fairy
tales with siblings. Couples who were maintaining troubled relationships
suddenly discovered a new meaning in co-existence repairing all the tattered
corners that led them to the courts for a settlement. Husband found the long
unused dusty violin in the attic and played a fine tune that he desired so long
to manage. The wife found their sepia coloured pre-marriage photograph in the
corner of a drawer and hummed a song and turning over the pages of a recent
recipe while searching the long forgotten lyrics in her hypothalamus. Earth
becomes greener. Butterfly came back suddenly in the drawing room and then it
came in a kaleidoscope. The sky is suddenly in a new life, not only attired in
the cadet blue but also dressed in aquamarine, cerulean, denim and also in
Prussian blue. The whole earth is in creativity.
There is always a comfort in
confinement.
Notes:
1. Ancient Chinese tradition started the practise of “zuo yuezi” or “sitting out the month” which means after giving the birth of a baby, a mother has to be in a compulsory traditional treatment to bring back health and fortune. In that thirty-day session of “zuo yuezi”, the mother would take a special food particularly prepared for confinement, she wouldn’t be allowed to go out rather she would wrap her body with layered dresses, even in hot summer, later avoiding any contact of water, no shower and not even brushing her teeth.
2. One of the Codes of Hammurabi goes like this: “If anyone has a claim for corn or money upon another and imprisons him; if the prisoner dies in prison a natural death, the case shall go no further. If the prisoner dies in prison from blows or maltreatment the master of the prisoner shall convict the merchant before the judge. If he was a free-born man, the son of the merchant shall be put to death; if it was a slave, he shall pay one-third of a mina of gold, and all that the master of the prisoner gave he shall forfeit.”
3. “Actually it’s quite a moderate sum that certain people want for rescuing you from here and getting you out of the country. And then surely you realize how cheap these informers are to buy off, we wouldn’t need much money to settle them.”
4. Virgil. Book 3 of Georgics. Line 284.
5. Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
** [ Sabuj Sarkar is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Gour Banga, Malda, West Bengal, India. He could be reached at:
sabuj.ugb@gmail.com]
An Oblique Journey
Teak tree near the wallSheds leaves, seeds, flowers and tears,Neighbours are in fight
Phuentsholing: Diving in the Sky
***
Sabuj Sarkar
Childhood tantrums found peace
Meeting the monks in saffron robes,
Semi-closed eyes with humanity
Oozing out in the glowing afternoon,
I walked up the paths of Phuentsholing
Amidst the weeping cypress.
Dragon never came to frighten us
Only the red flames of warmth
Hospitality
Cocooned us in.
What you call Amo Chhu, we call it Torsa,
Powerful foams with brave waves bring
Tales of bygone days
History mixes with memory
In the curves of road,
In every turn wide window
Opens a new horizon.
You see up from the hill top
Men walk like ants
Houses are like match boxes
Cars move like toys.
Brown valleys with wrinkled women
Ema Datshi on the platter
Your statistics measure
The index of happiness.
I roam more and more
The happy winding paths
With clean dark pitch road
In memory
for a destination
Perpetual.
The fragrance of ripe oranges never fades
away.
দাঁড়িপাল্লা
------ সবুজ সরকার
পচা পাটের নিজস্ব গন্ধ আছে এক
কাঁচে ঢাকা ল্যাবরেটরি তার ব্যাখ্যা দেয়,
ল্যাটিন শব্দগুচ্ছ মিলে মিশে যায়
গ্রিক অহংকারে।
শুধু, বৃষ্টি অধীর হলে
ব্যাঙেদের কোরাস -
দোহারা চেহারা
রোদ - বৃষ্টি গায়ে মেখে নির্মেদ,
আদুল গায়ে মেঠো শিশু
সারা গায়ে কাদা
ধ্যানস্থ শিব যেন ।
এরিস্টোফেনিস সখ্যতা করিয়ে দেন
বোলতা আর প্রজাপতির;
পরিশ্রমী জীবন স্বপ্ন আঁকে
জলের আলপনায়।
অভিযোজন ৮
------------------ সবুজ সরকার
ভাষার মতো বৃষ্টিও আঞ্চলিক হয়,
ভাগ করে নেয় গোবর লেপা উঠোন।
ভেজা শালিক ঘাড় বেঁকিয়ে দেখে নেয় আধ ভেজা
ত্রস্ত নতুন বউ,
আধা দৌড়ে রাস্তা পেরোয় এসপ্ল্যানেডে দাঁড়িয়ে থাকা বেতো অফিস
যাত্রী ।
ভাষার বৃষ্টি হলেও বৃষ্টির কোন ভাষা নেই;
ভেজা চুল ও ঠোঁট গড়িয়ে
মুক্ত ঝরে অবলীলায়।
শুধু আড়চোখে দেখে নেয় নরম বিলাস,
বৃষ্টিকে পোশাক করে একটা মানুষ- রিক্সা এইমাত্র শতবর্ষ পেরোলো।
ডাউন ক্যানিং
লোকাল
সারারাত নিজেকে শুকোই ভেজা কার্নিশে
রাত বাড়লে নেশা বাড়ে
আমেজ আসে ; দোসর হয়
ছাতিম ফুলের সুবাস।
গোটা শরীরে ইন্দ্রের চোখ নিয়ে দেখি
রাত বাড়লে নতুন করে জেগে ওঠে
একটা মেট্রোপলিস ।
বিনির্মাণ শব্দগুচ্ছ কাটাছেঁড়া করে থ্যানাতোস;
তৃতীয় সন্তানের পথ আগলে দাঁড়িয়ে থাকে
সরকারি আইন, শুধু
বেটোফেন সুরের অঙ্ক মেলায় সারারাত,
ভরে যায় লাল জাবদা খাতা।
অক্লান্ত টিরেসিয়াস অ্যামাজনে নতুন হার্ডডিস্ক খোঁজে।
ছায়া - মানব ----------------- সবুজ সরকার প্রতিটি দুঃসময় ভাগ করে দেয় দেশ, সমাজ আর মানুষকে ; যেন জন্মদিনের কেকের ওপরে রাখা সুদৃশ্য ছুরি ! ম...