Hometowns and The Poetics of Never-Return

It says something (possibly but not necessarily unsavoury) about the Bengali people that so many of our songs are about departure. As I type this from a cramped room in Toronto, I listen to a Hatirpool Sessions rendition of Jamaica Farewell that alternates between the Chakma and Bengali languages. Evidently, the music of departure has a hold over not just Bengalis, but over the many people that live in and around the land.

The music of departure (and accompanying homesickness- real, impending or imagined) kept me constant company this summer. I would roam through the streets of my hometown, months or weeks away from hopping onto my first international flight and my vision would be tainted (tinted?) by what the twentieth century author Bibhutibhushan used to refer to as ashonno biroher bishonnota. The melancholy of impending separation. Over and over again in Pather Panchali and its sequel Aparajito, this phrase is used to invoke the sadness that precedes spatial separation from the site of home. This summer, it was not difficult for me to find music in my mother tongue that blended well with my mood. Bengalis have been re-interpreting Jamaica Farewell for decades now. One that particularly resonates with me is Farewell Kolkata, a contemporary rendition by a band from my hometown; and is addressed to the same city. It evokes the peculiar affect of mon-kemon- not the sorrow of dramatic devastation, but a sense of consistent emotional unease. It speaks also of bishad-snaan, the sense of being drenched (literally showered or bathed) in the blues. The language of departure has always been a site for exploring the possible vocabularies of sadness- vocabularies that constantly demand expansion. An older but iconic Kolkata-based band, Mohiner Ghoraguli also sought to capture the persistence of the hometown in the expatriate consciousness. The name of the city becomes a refrain throughout the song, although its tune moves us away from the elegaic to a more grungy (?) rhetoric of desperation. This desperation is fitting in probash- the state of living away from the homeland because it generates a kind of helplesness. As the band spells out in another song with a similar theme

firley bolle fera jaye na/ just because you talk of returning does not mean you can

Much has been written about the emotions that living away from home generates. I could dwell on this too, but on the whole I do not find it quite as compelling as the time shaped by the shadow of impending departure. This summer for example, people started addressing me as if I was on the verge of death. Whether a life in Canada equals this is up for debate, but there seemed little acknowledgement of the fact that I would be back next summer, although not for good. The last months spent at home, amidst the long preparation for departure seem so fleeting in retrospect. They are like the minutes you spend at a hotel after you are done packing your things, when you are waiting for the cab to arrive or checking to see if you are leaving anything behind.

Amidst the disorientation, the sense of time not really being time as you know it anymore, music can ground you like nothing else. Maybe it is because of its ability to be played in loop, creating an effect that is hypnotic and dream-like. Or maybe that’s just me. Among all the songs of departure on repeat, one song was probably repeated a few times more than others. It has also been phenomenally popular on the (Bengali-speaking) Internet since its release. There is no way to fully escape it when scrolling through social media. A mix of two Bengali poems, its title translates simply to Two Songs of the City.

I was struck by the first poem incorporated into it in particular- Al Mahmud’s Aar Ashbo Na (I Won’t Return). The other poem seems to talk about love. E shohor deye ni amake kichui shudhu tomake chara, it says. This city has given me nothing apart from you. It is only in the backdrop of impending departure that this line is devastating. You had rather cry, Jim Morrison had sung. I had rather fly. This line is for the criers.

Shohorer Duita Gaan has kept me company halfway across the world from the one shohor that truly matters to me. A few days back, I was finally reunited with my copy of an Al Mahmud poetry anthology that I had bought shortly before leaving Kolkata. (Books really do bring so much of home with them when they finally come to you.)

For a man who never left Bengal, I thought absent-mindedly, this guy sure does talk a lot about leaving…and returning. I had been listening to the Gaan with an equal degree of absent-mindedness, but all that talk of departure from the city had definitely come to colour how I was reading Mahmud’s work. Then I realised I had got him all wrong. Mahmud wasn’t talking about travelling from one part of the world to another- rather, he was looking at the world (all of it) through the lens of impending departure. His awareness of the ephemerality with which we inhabit the world shapes his stance towards it, in aesthetic, ethical and political terms. Indeed, the three are never separate for him.

Another iconic Bengali poet of the past century, Jibananda Das had talked of his homeland using a similar rhetoric of firey asha/ return. May I return to this Bengal, be it in whatever form I may. This vision of reincarnation is not one that Mahmud’s religious views can accommodate. Something complex is at work here- a persistent desire (mostly unbidden) to return. Although there is faith in something indefinite yet good that lies across the horizon, it cannot blot out the charm of what exists here. The familiar is dear because it is known and loved and always about to be lost. The immediacy of this world, and its allure continue to be articulated in a vision of the natural world that is fundamentally rooted in its local specificities. In one poem, it is in the form of a bird, the ghughu.

In the song I play on repeat-

baire brishti’r dhoa

jeno shada shopner chador

bichiyeche prithibi te

Outside, the mists of the rain

Seems to have laid out a sheet of white dreams

Over the earth.

Any time now, I will witness my first snowfall. Maybe I will reminded through this of the rains back home. But it really is the world, then. The whole world is ours to lose at any minute.