Author: Mandira Mitra Chakraborty
Pages: 88
Year of Publication: 2025
Price: ₹350
ISBN:
978-81-985733-1-5 (9788198573315)
About the Author
Born in Ranchi on 29 January 1974, Mandira Mitra Chakraborty, as early as she can remember, wanted to be an astronaut. Ensconced in a family of wannabe poets whose unsold books lay in heaps in cupboards like wounded soldiers, the least she could have done is fly from poetry.
Instead, this is her second volume of poems, following her debut collection, Six Ways of Raising Daughters. She has also published a book of short stories titled Firefly Games.
In addition to poems, she loves dogs and nature. She teaches now at Taki Government College in Taki, West Bengal, but may board a spaceship anyday.
Life for her is elsewhere.
Teaser
My Mother’s Maiden Name
My old woman with Stage Five dementia
Suddenly claimed her maiden name today.
You are half a “Ray”, she reminded me
When I was bathing her, cloaked in a suit of flesh
She no longer acknowledges as her own, its
Functions strange and unattended, like a pried-open
Pomegranate, vulnerable and stark in its physiology.
“Remember,” she urged me, she who wrote one letter
Every year to her mashi in Krishnanagar at Bijaya,
In contrast to at least eleven to her in-laws, my paternal brood.
She was renamed, to match my father’s, to strengthen the bond,
Her old name slipping away quietly like
A forgotten first lover, or the lone kitten she left behind,
Who stopped eating after she left home.
Now she is only found in a vacant parking lot
Of her memories, where there are too many
Empty spaces with no conjunctions.
Speech comes, if it comes at all, in phrases
And in the manner in which lightning strikes
On a cold windy cloudless day without preamble.
“Remember”, she says as if memory were
A green creeper that one holds on to before falling
Into the deep chasm of life, its paradoxes too
Overwhelming for the human mind. For
The life of me I cannot decide where to keep this
Foreknowledge or foresight granted to me by her plight,
To live and change and keep the sorrow of it out of sight.
Notes:
mashi: maternal aunt
Bijaya: the last day of Durga Puja, a time of greeting
Contents
65 poems