Somewhere A Country

For V.B. - You don’t need your name spelt out.

by Arka Mukhopadhyay

Somewhere a country of blue mangroves
calls to us. There names have no
meaning and there you can go cycling
through countrysides drenched in
colours that have no language to describe
them, scattering the pages, all the
torn pages of your life to the winds. In that
country of blue mangroves there are no
stages and they detain actors at the
borderposts. There I can finally run gladly,
joyfully out of words - forget ‘grass’,
and ‘snow’ and ‘river’, meet
prince hamlet at a wayside bistro,
and realize he has lost his memory and
the only mystery that matters to him is
the smell of black coffee on his tongue. In that
country of blue mangroves that waits
for us they create raagas based on
the shape of your breathing. There we do
not talk to each other, or when we do
we speak in kalaripayattu and do not need to
say, afterwards, how lovely it was. In the silence that
stretches between us there is the scent of sumerian
wine and marine unicorns dancing. There the sunsets
are composed in bhatiyali. There you do not paint
and night comes to our eyes with the sigh of
an iceberg melting after ten thousand years.