The neuron’s journey through an unsettled historian | Varsha Dutta

The winter hearth
wills and opens out to silence
As she stares into the fire
and digs at the hardened calluses in her hand

She sits there roasting brinjals
peeling the brute off the seedy flesh
slippery, hot, palpable
Clutching onto half memories
slowly flaking off the autumnal despair
from calluses

She now roasts winter potatoes
new and clinging to loose soil
from her kitchen garden
and startlingly recoils

from the flesh of her memory  
when he started growing tangerines in his head
that would womb up to the size of fossil eggs
that started their gluey journey from seeds

of the beyond
about to embark on their necessary expedition.
                              .
The village dogs are the first to sniff the stale in the air
As despair wafts
through hungry nostrils
the smell of brittle bones around a powdered brain

where he clocked up fifty years of service
choking around Marx
and heavy cuff buttons
with letters dyed

from a red, decaying winter
now, frenzied word-droppings.

Powdered mulch
for the seasoned brain
Its diseased heritage.
              .
At times through the glint of his eyes he ejaculates humor
from that old sclerotic heart  

by now a thud replaced by the old village bell
that makes him hungry every time it tolls

and his mind’s tongue wanders and knowingly withdraws
after the last suck at the seed
and the need to be plucked by warm unseen hands.

He sits there mourning the loss of the undead
and at nights scratches at dawn’s surface
settling his memories
between donepezil and vapor

He is getting all too familiar with the devil
that no longer houses his attic

Those tangerines live off him.
                      .
The village dogs now all howl in union
making canine punctures through powdery flesh
The sun creeps in, from the bottom of his feet
in the morning

The shadows brawl
and the tangerines warm up
to the new hermitage
                    .
The tangerines are now giving away
and like disputing cells pledge under the microscope

Splayed like giant ancient creatures
with their grit firm even with decay
moist and coiled in sleep
after dissension

Stealthily waiting their turn each to give birth
to the lamb universe.

In silence they now wait
to be prodded about their time in mucolytic history
to only reveal half the tale

and like seaweeds
without an intent get washed to the shore
only to die with the war inside them intact
                             .
We were taught to master autopsies
on the living, unsettled historians
in rooms full of antics and vials of subdued corroboration
Silence would trail us like ghosts from the grave
We would pass the motion in silence
and later hush the not so clinical exegesis

“What do you think then? FLD? Huntington’s?

No, The devil in the form of tangerines

the devil then?

No, no, tangerines.”

Once, the hebephrenic, paranoid hare like poet with a hare-lip
celebrated the un-mysterious condition of the hare
and with hare-like propensity
dug parsnips in air
mixed it with rum-pum-pum and loose fenugreek  
and kicked the air
a child from that blue vapour
a blue gelding rose leaving behind smoke trails
That animal prodigy
now pre-disposes us to the war like
Animal conflagration in us all
                      .

Now catching the hour hands in a bizarre dreadlock
The warmth of the Eri wraps around her tiny frame
as the sweet mothy smell of despair and past longings
mingles with the winter hearth
and like dry leaves waiting to be caught by surprise
the hearth swallows her
The autumnal despair leads to the prelude
of an illicit dawn colored by the yolk of the eggs
florid and without an end
until the gelding rises
to become the blue horse
and swallows the hearth.                

…………………………………………………………………………………..

*Eri- The Eri sador, used as a shawl in the cold winters of Assam. The silk is derived from the Eri caterpillar.
FLD- Frontal lobe dementia
Huntington’s- Huntington’s disease

Indian Review | Literature and Poetry | Varsha Dutta lives in Mumbai and was born in Guwahati, Assam. She studied in Delhi and in England from where she specialised in cognitive neuropsychology.

 Varsha Dutta live in Mumbai and was born in Guwahati, Assam. She studied in Delhi and in England from where she was trained in cognitive neuropsychology. She has made a montage of the human landscape that she stealthily wanders and often likes to traipse through the unabsorbed, unaccustomed hinterland. Her articles have appeared in scientific journals and The Hindu and this is one of her reflective attempts in shorthand.