Author:  Purabi Bhattacharya
Pages: 128
Year of Publication: 2023
Price: Rs 500
ISBN:
978-81-961291-7-0 (9788196129170)
 
About the Author
Purabi Bhattacharya writes from the granular ground of Gujarat, guardianed by the prickly cacti and hot air, pining for the rains, the pine fragrance and the undulant Khasi hills of Shillong where she was born. The serenity, simplicity and serendipity of the serpentine alleys that saw her growing up seeped into the very core of her being. So much so, even two decades of stay in “developed” India has been barely able to urbanize her, an essentially cerebral nomad.
Ever since her first poem was published in Wanderlust (a journal of Writers’ Forum, Ranchi) in her formative years, her works have appeared in print, online journals and anthologies. A Writers Workshop author with two collections of poems, Call Me (2015) and Sand Column (2019), Purabi teaches and frequently reviews books as a panelist for the literary e-journal Muse India.
 
Teaser
The belief centres morph quickly as ballot boxes
and why do I name it so?
Its bitumen roads where the ungulates, “bangle cars”
pedestrians: men, women, their litters, politicians, assassinators,
victims, rioters, activists alike trod.
This is a place we haven’t slept in peace for long.
At 45 degrees the dhoklas, the dabelis spruce up the street.
The belief centres morph quickly as ballot boxes
where the blessed keep their surplus safe.
This land doesn’t cry, it cries foul: on food and fashion pandemic.
You and I, the hill-lost,
visit a six-hundred-year-old city,
still prime with heinous promises.
The women here cave in a hundred tainted tales
between their cleavages. They are the lionesses of their land.
They stray all around, loosely knotting
hundreds and hundreds of years of culture
in the back of their blouse knots.
You do not see the sun kneeling down anywhere,
as chivalrous as he gets here. He knows it’s worth every wait.
Meanwhile, the city at its fluky hours sautés
the hill woman and her man.
 
Contents
82 poems across three sections