Haimanti Dutta Ray, Poetry 2020 Longlist

Art’s Truth

What work of art is that you gaze at?

With diligence and care, had the model sat –

Yet when her job’s done, she left.

Leaving behind a painting, part cleft,

Partly finished, but for the horsehair touch

Of the brush which had brought out the blush

Of the maiden, sitting coyly and daintily

Averting the viewer’s gaze, hungrily

Devouring her -  one whose job’s to pose,

So as to help the young artist compose,

A painting that was a work of love,

A work that had peace just like the dove,

Acting as its central theme and message –

A deed that’s been handed down the ages.

 

Look at this young artist, who hadn’t had a morsel,

Of food since yesterday, yet gaping at things of tinsel!

Who’ll teach him that true art is as much

Of the mind as the heart, as such?

Yet he toils day and night over his canvases,

Which he knows, would travel a thousand seas,

On a day when he may be no more,

For he had gone to live a life, encore.

 

Art gives immortality to man,

Makes him transcend time as no one can,

Yet when we blaspheme an artwork,

Do we realize the value it hides under its cork?

Just like a bottle of champagne,

Whose brimming bubbles causes no one to complain,

But joy of intoxicants is effervescent,

As art is both timeless and cups within it a truth nascent.

Prose 500 2015 Featured Writer, Haimanti Dutta Ray

My Childhood

For everyone, childhood memories are something to which we return to time and again just like a train traversing the same route, but coming back to the same station at the end of the day. These memories are there to make our moorings stronger, so that we stand on a firmer ground later in life. I would take the time to confess here that I had a unique childhood. I was the only offspring of my parents, who were schoolteachers at the time of my birth. My mother was a teacher, but her school was located quite far from the city of Calcutta, where we lived. She used to commute by local train. From the Sealdah station, she used to travel to Agarpara, in the South 24-Parganas district of West Bengal. To reach Sealdah, she had to take a public transport (bus). And, her school hours were in the morning session. So she was out of the house by 5 am, in order to catch her bus to take her to Sealdah station, from whence a local train would make her arrive on time in her school. She had taught in her school for thirty-six years at a stretch. Today she is a retired government employee, enjoying her pension. 

When I was a toddler, the task of feeding me in the mornings fell, quite naturally, on the shoulders of my father. My father who was an art teacher at a city school, had taken voluntary retirement (the VRS scheme), probably because I was becoming too much to handle, single –handed. My mother used to return from her school by half past noon. Wonder how I remember the exact time! It seems just like yesterday once more! My father had taken to painting in a big way and of course, my mother had been his muse. We used to reside at our earlier rented premises at 160B, Sarat Bose Road, Calcutta 29. When I was very young, my parents had faced real trouble feeding me. There used to be a wooden rocking horse, on top of which I used to be seated, before my meals. The gentle swaying of the toy-horse acted like a lullaby and I was fed. 

We have left behind those premises and have moved to our posh-new flat at Lansdowne Terrace. The wooden horse had been there even when we were leaving the house, never to return again. But of course, it was in a sorry state. I still remember that the book that I loved most in my childhood had been in the vernacular- ‘Toontunir Boi’ by Upendra Kishore Roychowdhury, the grandfather of the virtuoso film director, Satyajit Ray. Sukumar Ray’s ‘Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La’ also resided among my other bric-a-brac. Childhood is the time for some unalloyed fun. It never returns to one’s life again. Make the most of it and watch yourself grow into a glorious individual.

Poetry 2014 Shortlist, Haimanti Dutta Ray

TO BE OR NOT TO BE

We had dissected the Bard
With scissor-precision,
And had come up with ideas
Novel enough to raise him
From his coffin
Lazarus-like, he’d have come,
To vivify or vivisect – us,
The sophomores engrossed in
English literature and language graduation.

The question – whether it’s better
To live or to die in pure ecstasy,
Whether it’d ‘far better’ to be ‘mad’,
Or to escape from the ‘madding crowd’,
In an instance of annihilation of the self,
Had bothered the most mystic of minds.
To ‘be’ware or not to ‘be’ware
Of the pitfalls of sheer pedagogy,
Had held all of us in thrall.

Bifurcations abound at every step
Of human existences.
We must possess the will power to overcome
The dilemmas that we face with sang-froid.
Had there been a way to discern
Our paths out of a Hamlet-like situation,
We’d never have been where we find ourselves in.
‘The question’ of the modern psyche,
Was eked out by the Bard of Avon
Thousands of years ago. Should it be better,
To seize upon the moment or let it pass us by?

Tragic heroes are born with ‘hubris’,
Destined to be the cause of their eventual decline.
They are made from ‘sterner stuff’,
So that they can be placed before the rest of us.
We imagine that we are as exalted as tragic heroes,
But not all men are born great.
We, the commoners, are a unique lot,
We are born to live out a life,
Ordinary in every sense, yet in death,
Do we achieve a glory never before dealt with.
It is this which set us apart from ‘heroes’,
Who are born great. Mortal glory
Passes into obituaries read out by near and dear ones.