I have seen buses turn the corner
With the confidence of men
Who have never been wrong.
From Howrah, from Barasat, from Dum Dum
From every outer radius
Of the city’s enormous lung,
Arriving as they always arrive:
Too full, too fast, too many at once.
The corner absorbing them
The way it has absorbed every arrival
Before this one.
I have seen the pigeons
Who have built their city
Within the colonial city,
Who occupy the cornices of the GPO
The way an old power occupies a ledge —
Not by right,
Only by staying,
Long enough that staying
Starts to look like belonging.
Unlike the Empire,
They take nothing home.
That is where the likeness ends.
I have seen them hold committee meetings
On the architrave,
Reach their grey consensus,
And take off
Into the grey summer air.
I have seen the mouth of the Metro
Give back its thousands at eight-fifteen,
Blinking in the light of a city
That does this everyday.
I have seen the space
Between the going and the coming
Filled with vendors
Tea, jhalmuri, peanuts, candy,
The newspaper with its enormous grief,
The man who sells watches
That were made to resemble other watches,
The woman outside New Market
Who has sat so long
The pavement has learned the shape of her.
This, too, is a kind of tenancy.
No one will write it into any deed.
I have seen the Maidan at noon,
Before the kalbaisakhi breaks it open,
When the heat lifts a second city
Above the first —
A transparent city,
A city of refraction,
Of almost-buildings,
The heat’s own restless architecture.
I have seen it at dusk,
When lovers sit on parked motorcycles
And the joggers pass
And the walkers pass
And the old man passes
Who has been passing at this hour
For thirty years,
Nodding to no one,
Needing no one —
Call it freedom
If you are young enough to still choose it,
Call it loneliness once the choosing
Has stopped being yours to make.
I have seen the Victoria Memorial
In the flat light of January,
Enormous, impeccable,
Absolutely certain of itself.
I have seen the schoolchildren
Brought to stand before it
And not told what it stood for.
The meaning left standing in the garden
Like a bill no one has yet been sent.
I have seen the bookstalls near the crossing
Shut their iron faces at seven,
Folding the paperbacks
Back into their darkness —
Tagore, Nabarun, a detective novel,
Manik Bandyopadhyay
With a name in the margin
I did not know.
I closed the book carefully,
The way you close a door on a room
Still occupied.
I have seen the tram go past
The tram go past
The tram go past —
Slow, deliberate, electric thing,
The oldest continuous argument
The city makes
Against the future.
Still going.
Still going.
I have seen the streetlight
At the Esplanade crossing come on
And what it makes of the faces beneath —
Every stranger briefly legible,
Briefly lit,
Briefly part of the composition.
Then the light changes.
Then the composition disperses.
And I have stood here,
In this crossing
Where Calcutta becomes Kolkata,
Where Kolkata still remembers Calcutta,
Both names hanging in the lit air
Like smoke from a cigarette,
Briefly visible,
Briefly itself,
Already becoming,
Something else.