Dipika Mukherjee

BIO

Dipika Mukherjee is an author and sociolinguist. Her second novel, Shambala Junction, won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction (Aurora Metro, 2016). Her debut novel was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and republished as Ode to Broken Things (Repeater, 2016). Her short story collection is Rules of Desire (Fixi, 2015) and edited collections include Champion Fellas (Word Works, 2016), Silverfish New Writing 6 (Silverfish, 2006) and The Merlion and Hibiscus (Penguin, 2002). She has two poetry collections: The Third Glass of Wine (Writer’s Workshop, 2015), and The Palimpsest of Exile (Rubicon Press, 2009)

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The Dialect of Distant Harbors

Bengali is my father tongue.
it is true my mother speaks Bengali,
crooned ফুলে ফুলে ঢ’লে ঢ’লে over sleepy
infant heads, but it was my father
who grounded Bengali, watered
the curlicues of text, weeded enunciation
through teenage years when English
whispered Put your head on my shoulder.

When Indian schools spat out Vernacular,
as the dark peasant destined for penury
and English strutted like a boss, my father
recited Tagore, the Bengali sibilants a song
on his tongue, বহু দিন ধরে, বহু ক্রোশ দূরে:
I have traveled miles, spent years afar,
seen mountains and oceans new,
but I haven’t seen, outside my door,
paddy glinting with morning dew.

Bengali is the seventh most spoken
language of our world. It will not disappear
by my neglect nor Bengali poets writing
in English, it is impervious to mad dashes
and enjambments, our stutters in severed tongues.
I fear –only–the absence from the vocabulary
of children; Seventh most spoken language of the world,
its majesty unfelt in this foreign tongue
I continue to write in, to speak in, to reach you…
…………………………………………………………………………………………….…to reach you.

Bengali is my language of love, of rage,
my deepest prayer in grief.

It is still my magic chalice
infusing the dialects
of my too-distant,
pale harbors.

 

 

Sempiternal Fire

At ninety-five, these hands are still in thrall;
a curve of hip, the lash of eye, the flash
of breast, a dancer’s back, all rise and fall,

a symphony still spirals through my brush,
I sweep the canvas colored, I rewrite
the censorship of fools, the righteous blush,

at nudity of Gods. Alas, my flight
to exile is not imaginary;
like childhood scribbles on mud floors, lamp lit,

my shadow-hand looms giant, and wary
over my creations. Will my art last?
I most fear death, as they will not bury

my body with kin, but far from my past,
far from the Mumbai that speaks my tongue, rife
with movie billboards, a curvaceous cast

all cleavage and lips — much larger than life —
in wet white saris unwrappable girls;
the money pours in. But Gods, like a wife,

must be fully-clad, wholesome, not unfurl.
I, barefoot Muslim at temples ancient,
am too pagan, bold, in this dizzy hurl

towards a modern Hindutva. No scent
of nuance, so I paint cinematic
large, brash, this Holy Trinity: Present

Destroyer first, not last. Shiv kinetic
with snakes and floods, rich in matted icons
to execute. Preserver, lethargic

Vishnu; Androgynous, taking no stance,
in blind complicit Middle. Last, Creator
Brahma pared to third-eye-one-head essence…

flame leaping from mind to hand to acquire
a legacy, of sempiternal fire.
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