Editor’s Note
There is a rich spillage of images in Satya Dash’s poems. In ‘Slippery Town’, Dash takes us to the time past, where his days were spent “lying on coir cots under the gassy moonlight,” listening to “mother recounting episodes from Mahabharata,” and in “a deluge of coaching classes.” One image is superimposed on the other, and this superimposition continues until we get in front of our eyes something akin to a Renee Sandell painting with its vibrant and dense foreplay of figures and scenes. While reading, you might notice the poet’s unfaithfulness towards one-poem-one-image just like Sandell’s abhorrence towards any one particular shape or colour, each poem-painting swelling with multiple narratives. True to its name, ‘Slippery Town’ doesn’t stick with a memory but rather slips from one anecdotal lore to another, all the while flirting with the reader’s imagination. The poem zooms in to the point of the images becoming multiply pixelated, and, contrary to many poems that set out to achieve this particular effect, Dash’s poem achieves a kaleidoscopic clarity instead of a botched confoundedness.
—Ashish Singh
The Bombay Literary Magazine
father’s post cataract lens gleaming past dusk and mother’s golden
hemmed sarees billowing on the terrace here we gathered for relief
after May afternoons made glistening copper of our sleeveless arms
lying on coir cots under the gassy moonlight the music of our chatter
disrupted only by a thirst for wind my sister pinching my nose
when I pretended to snore mother recounting episodes from Mahabharata
in such celestial exposure rain never seemed far my time on this planet seemed
like something I wanted to dwell on such dwelling forbade
by the years that arrived soon a deluge of coaching classes to crack
the country’s toughest entrance exams days spent in determining
the most appropriate choice from a, b, c, d in this nervous frenzy I got for my
scooter’s number plate a motivational quote sticker : success is no accident
that Honda Activa a reluctant gift my father gave me after my costly slip-up
when I forgot to lock my bicycle while walking round the ruins of the old school
phone glued for hours to my sticky ears enamored with the extra talk time
of a new top-up plan what a catalyst it was for my blossoming teen romance
of course the bicycle disappeared this brush with deception redolent
of sulky delight my bag dropped on the road by the thief I suppose as a gesture
of goodwill so on the pavement I sat exhausting a month’s quota of cigarettes
to ease my loss Kumar Sanu’s nasal twang consoling my eardrums
a few hundred meters ahead a site of supernatural presence folks apprehended
after a cousin brought there his first plot of land the supervisor at the gas agency
moonlighted his shamanic talents chanting a mantra he scooped a fistful
of soil asking us to inhale its essence I couldn’t be sure if it smelled
of attar he had already rubbed his palms with though soon we discarded
these fears devouring dahibara aloodum at the roadside stall guzzling milkshakes
at the junction’s sandwich shop where I once saw five men struggle to keep
two men from tearing each other apart after each claimed to be more in love
with the same woman brutality of this amorous skirmish underlining
the town’s dangerous conflation of love and violence the popular tea seller
down the same road arrested for lacing his masala chai with opium
now back here after years on vacation from work a few of us get wasted
before attending a dear friend’s wedding reception flaunting glassy smiles
while posing with the puzzled couple on the lawns beside the cricket stadium
when I return home my sister cackles hard to see for the first time the unbridled glow
of my intoxicated face I hug her with a tenderness I had forgotten I was capable of
the laughter in her eyes affirming I had a boyhood once
On the surface of the bean
bag, the image of a giant
moon, not so giant as its
real size but giant enough
to create a crater in the living
room when a torso indented it.
In it, you sink down sleeping,
feet up. Hands down, it’s the best
thing I have never done. I put
a blanket over you. You snore
louder. I collect water in a bowl
to make Maggi. You wake up
to my slurping. The act of sharing
my plate with you takes from me
a great deal of will. I do it
because I am working
on sharing. I don’t want to disappoint
myself. Especially later. And you, now.
We discard the spoons, forking
our fingers. We chew till a couple
of Schitt’s Creek episodes
are done. Heading out
for a walk, we collapse
on the grass. Blabbering
to the blood moon, we
pass out with the stars.
My grandmother’s motivations while jumping off
a running train are not clear to me. No one narrates the story with any
real conviction. My father says, she probably fell
asleep and when the train was leaving, she realized it was her station. She must
have forgotten some luggage at the tea counter on the platform, says my aunt,
chuckling. My mother believes—you never know, she could have done it
for the adrenaline rush; she loved pulling stunts, which is why she made it
a facet of the myth grandma’s personality has become for me. I enjoy
listening to these glinty refractions, the way the singular truth of a body is juiced
into thick light in our mouths when we talk about what, when and how someone
did what they had to. At a lake-view bar in Bangalore, weeks before his wedding,
my friend bashfully confides he finds everything in life meaningless these days.
As we get smashed, in a spur of unsolicited inspiration I offer him the example
of MS Dhoni smacking the ball into orbit to finish a cricket match
and then suddenly lose my train of thought. He buys me another Long Island
iced tea. Later I text him— the game means so much that Dhoni has trained
himself to pretend it doesn’t matter, which is why he aces it— the meaninglessness
of a moment dancing beside its meaning, no? The next day my friend comes
to pick me up wearing a t-shirt bearing an image of Schrodinger’s cat inside
an opened box. My turn to buy him a drink. But my own doubts don’t let me tell him
the trained mind commits spectacular transgressions too. While interviewing
for a job when asked to talk about an adversity I converted
into an opportunity, out of nowhere I mention my unprocessed shame
from the decades of unhappiness my parents endure in living with one another
and how I try channeling that agony into working hard. This answer
makes sure it is the last question, the ropes of sweat
on the interviewer’s brow twisting my stomach into knotty growls
and I’m cordially shown the door. At a check up after an ECG, the physician says
my heart is fine but asks me to abstain from smoking. I start having dreams about
a benign boulder released from its chains in the left ventricle of my heart,
rolling down mossy hills, my father standing in its way as he throws a ball
for me to catch, my reaching across to save him, mother’s face growing younger
as she sprints from a meadow screaming my name. At my next job
interview, the sun soaks in the silver ocean
of the recruiter’s Zoom background and I find myself talking
about ambivalence.
Acknowledgements
Image credits: Robert Frank (1924-2019). Children with sparklers in Provincetown (1958). Gelatin silver print, 21.3 x 31.8 cm.
According to the Christies’ lot listing, the kids holding the sparklers are Pablo, Barbara Forst and Dody Muller. The woman’s name is Mary Frank (Robert and Mary divorced in 1969), and the photo is from her collection.
Author | Satya Dash
Satya Dash is a recipient of the Vijay Nambisan Poetry Fellowship and the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. He has also been a finalist for Platypus Press’s Broken River Prize. His poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, and Cincinnati Review, among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator. He has been nominated previously for Pushcarts, Nina Riggs Poetry Award, Orison Anthology and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack and now lives in Bangalore, India.
