‘Their voices carry the liquid freshness of youth’: Bhaswati Ghosh’s poems about homes left behind

Nostalgic For a Place Never Seen

Brides in some places catch
moonbeams through a sieve.
A ritual insurance on a husband’s
longevity. When she left home,
my grandma smuggled a river
in her eyelids. Sugandha, it was called.
Su-gandha, the sweet-smelling one.
She stole the river so that whenever
she shed a tear, she could smell
the river in the air around her.
An insurance against forgetting.
Her new home had no water near it.
In Jhalokathi, her forever former

home, Sugandha courses on the same
as before. Canals branch out from its cool, aquamarine breadth to steer thirsty
travellers. With a little help, the brook
learns to punctuate herself.
A green dreamscape
holds the water in
a bracket.
A floating bamboo bridge, bony, resolute,
gives a paragraph break to its carefree
run-on sentence streams.
On the edge of a fisherman’s home,
little girls pull toy boats, their giggles
running over the river’s ripples.
In a video about Sugandha, I see a mother
combing her daughter’s hair. Before I know it, the daughter turns into my grandma
and breaks into a song.
“Why don’t you come to our house anymore?” she asks.

Native Dialect

Because she couldn’t bring with her the waters of Sugandha, the river in her village,
my grandmother brought along utterances that smelled of its moist earth. Togo, aamago, eda, oda, komu, khaamu,

the tongue’s catalogue of frank intimacy. The city ordained the refugee...

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