Tag: Muse India

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Poetry

Pidgin, Pockets & more…

Pidgin We have no language in common, hence, turn to pidgin. Pitch makeshift tents on half-hearted ground. Peg raw, jagged adjectives, broken verbs on stubborn clotheslines of need to offer damp confessions to the watery sun of our understanding. Some significations fall into place like punctuations well-meant. Others are lost like winged seeds as they spin towards uninviting ground. For the rest, silence rules; eats its way with acerbic faith into the hesitation of spaces. We meet in pidgin's transit; part without memory. Pockets When it comes to chests, drawers, pockets, I can be a nuisance. Given one to myself I pile an entire life in it sans a sense of order. Staples, clips, buttons, a watch perhaps will jostle here with currency notes, pencil shavings, a chance leaf, an unfinished letter, some candies for you, a book I am trying to read. Their nature hardly matters save they each matter to me. In the way that sharing every morsel of my hours with you matters and I thoughtlessly feed you with pieces of myself the day through. Putting in guilt, memory, sorrow, laughter all together, unsorted, a mosaic of myself, a mess. Is that why you left? Granted We grow up taking too many things for granted - hems, shores, rivers, knots, words, locks, walls. Yesterday, I felt betrayed when a door that had promised to stay shut, unwarranted, gave way. Uncritiqued In teeming landscapes of punctiliously ordered signifiers, I strive to break free of grooved meanings to rebelliously create my own. I knife through assumptions, dig into inferences, plunder synonyms, claw allusions. But, on diet, it is futile to want to turn words into salt-shakers in the concrete hope of sprinkling salvation. Some texts, perhaps, are best swallowed, uncritiqued.

By Basudhara Roy

Pidgin

Pockets

Granted

Uncritiqued

Basudhara Roy is the author of two books, a monograph, Migrations of Hope: A Study of the Short Fiction of Three Indian American Writers (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2019) and a collection of poems, Moon in my Teacup (Kolkata: Writer’s Workshop, 2019). She has been an alumnus of Banaras Hindu University where she was awarded the gold medal for academic excellence at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She secured the UGC Junior Research Fellowship and has earned her doctoral degree in diaspora women’s writing from Kolhan University, Chaibasa.  Basudhara’s areas of academic interest are diaspora writing, cultural studies, gender studies and postmodern criticism. Her research articles and book reviews have widely appeared in reputed academic journals across the country and as chapters in books. As a creative writer, she has featured in an anthology, Dancing the Light: Poems from Australia and India,  and in magazines like Muse India, Shabdadguchha, Cerebration, Rupkatha, The Challenge, I-mantra, The Volcano, Gnosis, Daath Voyage, Das Literarisch, Reviews, Triveni, Setu, Hans India and on the Zee Literature Festival Blog. She is Assistant Professor of English at Karim City College, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand and can be reached at basudhara.roy@gmail.com.