Beyond Land and Time

Loken Bose’s Journal

(Loken Bosher Journal)

Translated by Fakrul Alam

I used to love Sujata once—

Do I love her now?

That is something to think about when one has the time,

But there is never any time;

But perhaps there will be time when Hemanta’s late autumnal mood sets in;

Now Charvaka, Freud, Plato and Pavlov on the shelf

Wonder whether I love Sujata or not.

I have a file of old letters;

      Letters that Sujata wrote to me,

Some twelve, thirteen, or even twenty years ago;

      Rummaging through files is work fit for spindly clerks;

            I won’t rummage through them today;

            Who will benefit from it?

Seems to me Amita Sen is intimate with Shubol,

            With only Shubol? Of course with her I,

I mean—the woman I am calling Amita—

      But never mind;

      But still—

      This day the heart is no more a traveler.

      If a woman is like a mirage—yet—

      How can the mind become a caravan for her now?

Decrepit heart, you

Move into fabled land in a slight simoom

Or perhaps the kind of desert celebrated in song;

Heart, my heart!

Next you withdraw silently into your self—

Having got hold of the mirage and won much fame—

Where the sand is eloquent in its silence

Where love is not merely love.

Does Shubol love Amita Sen?

Does Amita herself love him?

      These are things to be thought out when there is time

      One needs a lot of time;

One wants to roll up the universe into a ball;

      Yet one will have to go out to tennis still;

      Come back, and set out for the club at night again;

      When will one have the time for all that?

In the late autumnal grassland blue flowers bloom—

      The heart flutters who knows why,

“I loved”—embers—guilt-ridden—memories

      Why do they confront me now?

Did she—had Sujata fallen in love with me?

      Is she in love with me still?

Electrons hurl about in their orbits on their own;

In which purged fading sky will the answer resound?

Sujata is in Bhubenshwar now;

      Is Amita in Mihijam?

Not knowing where she has been is a good thing—in every way!

Blue white flowers bloom in the grass in the late autumnal scene;

Its placid course is one aspect of time;

      And yet it is never completely still

Every day new life forms take root again.