‘When Time is a Magic Jar’: Poems of despair and decay, alongside hope and undying dreams of love

Mallika Bhaumik’s third collection of poems, When Times is a Magic Jar, has memory and a lost past as major motifs in her evocative verses. For she is able to make time melt in the palm, shrink it to a dot, make it fluid so she can both dream and “rush back to chase the fireflies”. At its most primal, the past is about the tall, lean frame of a mother waiting to take her ten-year-old daughter home, the child prattling on, as they walk home together in the rain under a blue umbrella. Life right now is more difficult. For it is not only about the mother’s breathlessness, a dim retina and painful limbs but how these fragile years press upon the narrator, metaphorized by a tour site she plans to visit where a tree forces its way through a ruined temple roof. At the end, everything blurs.

A nominee for the Pushcart Prize for Poetry in 2019, Mallika Bhaumik’s poetry, short stories, essays, articles, travelogues and interviews have been published in various journals and anthologies, the latest being her non-fiction essay in Our Stories, Our Struggle: Violence and the Lives of Women. Bhaumik received the Reuel International Prize for her debut poetry collection, Echoes (Authorspress, 2017)....

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