Casualty | Ananya Dutta Gupta

The Toto-wallah
Asked for more.
He made it sound
Like a legitimate demand.
Perhaps I was miffed not to hear,
"Please, Sir, may I have some more?"
As I got off, I gave a thirty.
A gesture for me,
A vindication for him.
All was well.
Except the goodwill
That would have lent ease to the asking,
Please, Sir, can you stop here for a minute?
Please, Sir, do you see the wild egrets on the glade?
Please, Sir, do you see the budgerigars and cockatoos over there,
At the Emporium crossing?
Neither the free foragers nor the caged entertainers,
Neither the gleam of spotless white
Nor the splurge of splendid colour
Will be here tomorrow.


30 October 2022

Ananya, trained at Jadavpur and Oxford, has been teaching and researching English Literature for two decades. She was Charles Wallace India Trust Visiting Fellow at Cambridge in 2015. She has research articles, translations, essays and travelogues to her credit. In poetry, she responds to her immediate human milieu and non-human environs with a combination of curiosity, intuitiveness and criticality. The past four years have seen her publish poetry with Tell Me Your Story, Muse India, Gulmohar Quarterly, Indian Ruminations, Cafe Dissensus, RoughKhata and Teesta Review. Her poem ‘Howrah Junction’ – was one among twenty internationally selected entries in Global Conversations (CRASSH, Cambridge (2021). Her debut collection of eighty bird poems, For Tomorrow the Birds Might Still Sing (Santiniketan: Birutjatio, 2021), is in circulation now.