Dreaming Among Debris
Sayan Aich Bhowmik’s debut collection, I Will Come with a Lighthouse (Hawakal Publishers) dissolves the space between innate and extraneous, past and present, dreams and disillusionments, commonplace and cosmic, seamlessly flitting through rooms, cities, memory, borders and history.
Well-written poetry has a penchant for taking its readers through the realms that have made and un-made the poets themselves. Sayan Aich Bhowmik’s debut collection, I Will Come with a Lighthouse (Hawakal Publishers) dissolves the space between innate and extraneous, past and present, dreams and disillusionments, commonplace and cosmic, seamlessly flitting through rooms, cities, memory, borders, and history.
As the poet lets us know in his Acknowledgements, the poems emerge out of negotiations with “notions of identity and the spectre of belonging, a constant grappling with versions of the self and their idiosyncrasies”. Often, these verses are reflections on love, longing, and loss, and a yearning for times and places that have only come to exist in memories and dreams
Bhowmick’s voice, too, remains one plagued with the ravaged consciousness of the disillusioned city-dweller, one that is spent and stretched to the hilt. This voice rises from the debris that remains after innocence is desecrated, hope withered, and vitality wrecked—all the while marked by excruciating awareness. On account of its resilience, it comes to bear the insignia of hope and mettle, enough to envisage home.
With verses marked by negative spaces and ‘absent presence’(s), Bhowmick trails along the prosaic everydayness which haunts a disenchanted urban existence. Letters lie unclaimed at the post office, names disappear from telephone directories, rooms turn too small for sunsets, cities and small towns ‘escape maps’, empty streets remain overcast by “the irritating sound / of the sky dragging its feet”, and days become, “clerks going to office / same routes, same trajectories / without fail, without orgasm.”
Amid the vapid and the quotidian, the voice of the poet—like the desiccated modern man—breaks into splinters- multiplying. It is as much flanked by the presence of Leonard Cohen, Charles Bukowski, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Agha Shahid Ali as it is by his grandmother. Cities, acquaintances, strangers and lovers, too, assume existences marked by multiplicity. A horde of unknown voices colonise long-distance phone calls, women desire to inherit all nine lives of a cat, lovers realised only in fragments bear “711 Windows” underneath, skin flakes fall off people as they “rush to match the turning of the world”. In the country of exile which “dreams in the language of return”… “everyone looks like everyone else”. Ironically, the fissuring of the self becomes a homogenising agent, yoking the devitalised and the dislocated to hackneyed existence.
Bhowmik not only bridges the space between the binaries of grief and felicity, life and death, but ends up calling into question their ossified credentials. His soaring flights of fantasy are better understood as buoyant possibilities, attempts to construct alternate realities—homes—rather than idle fancies.
In the poem, “After Dinner”, for instance, the entire city speaks through the poet’s radio—drowned, amalgamated voices in transit and translation—“like leftover food” on the table. The ‘directory of longing’ the poet feasts on, however, remains a longing for a kindred soul, a desire, which, amid “mirrors that failed / to show what we wanted to see”, and “nights that refuse to end” hits an inexorably humane chord.
The identity of the poet too, remains disintegrated, protean, trammelled by nondescript duties of a workaday world, squeezed between cities and phone conversations. In the poem “The Last Time” which deals with suicide, before letting the readers know of the same, the poet interjects unobtrusively: “The electricity bills had been paid”. This statement itself captures the vein of stoical indifference—brutally honest in its matter-of-fact dismissiveness—which saturates Bhowmik’s consciousness and runs throughout the work. Uninspired fulfilment of one's perfunctory duties remains a prerequisite—even in death.
Interestingly, the image of the poet is never conceived in direct terms, but through someone else’s lens, as a photograph, with his “back towards the camera / lighting a cigarette with the sun.” In the poem, “Of Previous Births”, the poet’s lover writes in air their “names from previous births”, commingling again the past and the present, the imagined and the real, the poet and his legion of alter-egos.
Through a narrative punctuated with “the kind of solitude which even / a bartender is afraid to cure”, the yearning—for love, home, belongingness, voice—becomes paramount and pressing.
In his ‘twins’, thus, the poet seeks someone who is as debilitated, fragile, stretched to the breaking point, “made of paper and glass”. A suicide note fills an entire neighbourhood with the scent of attar, which breaks in reveries amid burnt toast and washing powder, during lovemaking. And then:
Someone in another town
goes undressing the skies
and unlocking old stories
buzzing around eager children.
Amid stultified time and distorted spaces—calendars melting like wax, weeks and months smudging into a pickle, and nights having ‘no other side’—the poet wonders, “After all said and done / isn’t death another way / of being accepted somewhere else?”. Bhowmik not only bridges the space between the binaries of grief and felicity, life and death, but ends up calling into question their ossified credentials. His soaring flights of fantasy are better understood as buoyant possibilities, attempts to construct alternate realities—homes—rather than idle fancies.
Thus, horses run to their ‘imagined homes’ across Andalusia. At the community tap, a random passerby—a Godot who ends up arriving in the poet’s alternate, imagined realm—stops to drink from the rains. In the poem, “The Stamp Collector”, the eponymous subject sorts postcards from towns he has visited in his dreams. The poet, too, can muse amid everything about his favourite fantasy of lighting up a planet with a cigarette.
Moths, emissaries between past and present, drab realities and illusive paradisal realms, transcend temporality and travel between Calcutta and Kolkata—the poet’s ‘Janus’ city—in the epigraph. Telephone wires “sizzle in the dark” with sustained hope. Stars and the Milky Way recur in the poems: not only embodying a dare to dream against the tide, but compounding in their symbolic significance to accompany everything from yearning to ensuing disillusionment. On occasions, stars become dice with which men gamble over their lost childhood. On others, they are corpses on the lapel of a “really drunk night”, or, for the men from Salamanca, emblems of dejection with “sad lights” dripping from them. In the poems “ On Love”, sensuality remains couched in cosmic metaphors; stars, like the scintilla of love itself, hint at deliverance amid debris, illumination amid darkness. The poet plucks stars from lovers’ clothes, ceilings open up to the sky in hopes of salvation, and after every star has been ‘touched’, they melt—dimmed, spent—reminding us that ecstatic passion, like all things, must reach an impasse.
Between ‘ghosts of lovers’ who speak like public address systems, and the vacuum lingering even between lips about to be locked in a first kiss (“First Time”), Bhowmick reminds us of the disillusionment suffered by idealised love, when, and if, actualised. The sky, too—a celestial realm embedded with stellate, dreamlike spectres promising hope—when unfolded, reveals cigarette burns all over, presaging the poet’s sordid epiphany.
Pivotal to the dialectic of the collection’s narrative is “Elsewhere”. Tugging at the readers’ heartstrings, the poem concerns itself with jilted love, where the narrator’s inamorata “brought down every lighthouse” that could have led the poet to her. The poet, here, does not conclude with a wonted love-lament, but with a resolve to consciously move ‘somewhere else’ to actively seek out new settlements beyond the memories and associations evoked by the former love-interest. The lighthouse, we realise, is a beacon in our inner sanctum, which promises to persevere, and dares to dream—even amid debris.
The ‘Political Poems’ in the collection, too, convey the necessity of ideating recasted spaces. Bhowmik moves among landmasses marooned, cities trapped inside subways, burning “on the wings of a butterfly”—Lahore, Delhi, Dhaka, Calcutta/Kolkata, and Kashmir—where “guns go off like / sirens announcing lunch at the warehouse” and “even the flowers look askance / before winking at the bees”. He also recalls the partition “spectacle / of slicing the country and women / into pieces’, where his grandmother kept dreaming of outlandish pirates trapped in an island so remote it is left inaccessible even to spirits. Pipe dreams too, expose a desire for a home, a coveted safe space in the midst of turmoil, carnage, and precarity.
Amid looming anxiety and trivialised violence, there lies a desire to set history free, undo the past, transcend collective trauma, and conjure up spaces inundated with possibilities. This is partly why the poet’s grandmother conjures up stories from her ‘pashmina threads’ of memory. The neat order of ants in ‘Hindustans and Pakistans’ symbolising diminished refugee existence, too, remains embedded in a history deliberately reimagined and ironically inverted. Bhowmik’s search for belongingness, thus, broadens into a search for “a land / without identity cards”— a space beyond reductive affiliations where borders dissolve and the past is amended—an imaginary homeland.
On occasions, words are visualised as roguish agents of violence—“more sinister than politicians”—who, disavowed and rudderless, confront each other at dusky alleyways and war till they acquire a space on a page.
I Will Come With A Lighthouse is a tempest, tossed quest which seems to acknowledge, articulate, reimagine, and through that very process, transcend the dreary realities which circumscribe the human experience at large. Eventually, the collection culminates in meta-poetry. The poems are described as ‘simple acts’ like opening a fridge, which induce a ‘simple disappointment’ of finding it empty. They attest to a resignation which often seems to dominate the poet’s consciousness. The vein of bleak pessimism which underlies them is further exposed when Bhowmik compares the act of writing to fastening a noose around the neck—and in a moment of grim confrontation, kicking the chair.
Bhowmik’s search, however, persists, animating not only in search for a self and a country, but also, for a language. His poems not only take shape under ‘Sylhette’ moons, but also contain passing references to Urdu, Swahili, and old Parisian dialects.
In the poem “Choices”, poetry is visualised as a fluid, spirited entity, a vital agent which can ‘choose’ languages and dialects for itself. On occasions, words are visualised as roguish agents of violence—“more sinister than politicians”—who, disavowed and rudderless, confront each other at dusky alleyways and war till they acquire a space on a page. Eventually, poetry itself comes to emblematise the deranged, the lovelorn, the estranged, and the disenfranchised—all the voices that we encounter through the narrative. Exiled by overwhelming consciousness and disintegrated by profusion of selves, they come to represent the discontented everyman. Bhowmik, through his words, captures the poet in motion, fumbling through a host of possibilities in the process of engendering a single word.
He fluctuates-
between two languages …
between Faiz and Shahid
between nights descending on Lahore
and evenings on grocery shops in [the] neighbourhood …
between two selves …
one watching the river go by in Banaras
the other burning in Kashmir.
Amid a multiplicity of worlds and idioms, these are poems which “write themselves / no matter which language they choose”, demanding to be written, and insisting to be encountered. The poetry remains clouded by wraiths of yesteryears and a rabble of abandoned words, housing a voice distinctly post-apocalyptic, springing from the remains of a dissipated psyche. It not only articulates and attains a desired catharsis, but also leaves ground for newer raptures through mythmaking. In the process, it challenges the myopia and the imaginative drought which saturate present times, promising of a remedied world arising out of dross.
In his mass burial ground of a notebook, Bhowmik begins by chiselling his name “on the sadness of the sky’s dark blue”; and through that very process, comes up with a Lighthouse … and much more.
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Ritoshree Chatterjee pursues her undergraduate degree in English literature and struggles to locate herself through writing amidst the chaos. Her poems have appeared in Café Dissensus, Madras Courier, The Punch Magazine (The Poetry Issue 2022), The Late Night Poets’ Anthology, The Armchair Journal, and Plato's Caves online.
