Chitragrib the Pigeon & an Exhaust Fan—

By
SASWATA SEN

She was no Eleanor Marx

Nor was I a Him; yet
I hid behind a lonely tree
At Rabindra Sarobar, she searched me with a
Rheumatic heart, unsteady on her tiny feet.
----****------
A pigeon meanwhile cooed nesting in an old building’s cranny
And boomed
Interminably.
------******------
Her little broken, discolored toys, recyclable
Littered on a pock-marked, red cement floor
You put them away as
‘matter out of place’
she cried: where are my things?
Elders said: Ask the pigeons!
She prayed: Payla , payla, de, de!
Oh, pigeon, return my things . . .
The pigeon never knew; the pigeon never flew. . .

__________*********___________
Four scorching summers later, the pigeon morphed;
Chitragrib was the name: Yet to learn
How to fly.

A martinet with an uterine pride ruled and

Rued: she didn’t learn her Patha Bhavan homework right;
And an accomplice for the mischief:
Well, who else ? You guessed it,

The pigeon never flew.

_________*********-----------------
One score and seven years later
Early winter chill coveralled the Indira Gandhi airport
In the wee hours; a bunch of lanky, unkempt, frail bipeds
Waved at me
H1-B executed!
Did the pigeon fly?
I wondered

________*********-------------------
Crimson granite, bathtub cream-of-yellow, ornate toilet and an
Exhaust duct wrapped in plasticity of humanness
To be fitted; the shopper sang, spreading all
On a lazy-Susan: ‘this doubles up both as a fan & an exhaust, sir’
‘it sucks in and it sucks out?’ My frowns did a Jacques Derrida,
‘Ye’ was the answer.

Time passed with the only two hands

aeons sank in the cipher like flakes of mica in the sands.
A boom, boom, boom . . .
And a flutter of feathers . . .
Lo, it’s a pigeon, . . it,
Nay, a she, brought in waste
strands of straw and wood and what-have-you.
A nest grew; battling the rotors fiercely like
A Seattle one-room pad
braving a snowstorm, diffident;
The duct closed; time and again, time and again
Time and again.
The pigeon never flew. . .
‘ "Tirra lira," on the toilet seat
‘ “ Sang Sir Lancelot” ’.
______*******----------------

A housemaid took charge for that was the wish

Of the lady with the uterus; shoved and poked
Pushed and poked . . .
The fan worked
Peacefully.

Settled I to this New nothingness

To hear suddenly the
Booms:
Bakam, bakam, bakam. . again again
Oh! Oh! the pigeon never flew

-------*******-----------------

The great Virgin took form in the

Greater-Half
Commanded it be done again, and by the
Man selling indulgences; a holy redemption!
Peeped I and peered, priggish as a primate
: there’s an egg tiny as a blue-white marble pellet
breathlessly, namelessly, defenselessly before
 the ‘doctrine of eminent domain’
pushed I this all into the abyss below like a
Nero tutored by Seneca; must I well play the fiddle
Of Eminent Domain;

The pigeon never flew. . . .

---------*******----------------
I switched off the exhaust ! turned on the
Fan;
To suck in , to suck in only in. . . in. . . in. . . in
Penance;
So, the pigeon never knew
And the pigeon never flew.

(526 words)