‘Is your dress smeared with the colour of olives?’: What Soumitra Chatterjee’s poem says about wars

Wartime

Our country is not warring right now
With any other country
Still, you have got to know
A state of war has been declared
Barbed wires at the borders, beyond that – prohibition
In olive-coloured clothes
Alertness of the woodlands
And so, with much added caution
One steps into the forest
To the sound of bullets, a fusillade, do you hear it?
Within wordlessness, now
Are bitter words of wartime
An explosion created by anger’s frenzied regret
Is to be deflected – towards safety
By lowering a trench that lies only within your heart
Did you know this?
Here, the worldly-being
Recalls the honeyed moment
Just before the war began
The sanyasi
Seeking peace after the war
Sits bent-kneed
Even the poets
From the trenches, through their binoculars
Watch the seasons turn
The chilly winds of Magh
Sweep memories in
And depart with dreams
This winter
Is your dress smeared with the colour of olives?

Wartime is not war, though it could include actual conflicts. It is simply a tract of time, a signpost “wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war,” Thomas Hobbes had averred. Indeed, wartime is a predicament and a temperament to which a whole people one day wake up and find themselves mired in. In fact, unknown to them, they begin to gravitate towards such a state until it takes away their multiple private times and flattens them into a homogenous time for everyone. Such a...

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