Do not tamper my Blackboard with Pencil | Chandril Chattopadhyay

Blue
Is the sky;
Red is the sun;
Green are the leaves;
Yasmin: do not touch my new colours
Abbu bought it from Board Bazaar yesterday.
                     
                         We had five dreams meeting
At the University Road in “Peasha-War”:
Where on days of strike we played cricket
I am in my sixth grade-
Making mistake while spelling my homeland ,
Where in the morning Ammi cooked Lacchas;
And I was used to fly kite with the neighbor boy Akbar.
                         
                My elder brother learns history at Home,
With the two index tops into his ear labyrinth,
Infusing memory with each passing word
That sounded like Gospel –
They glorified Peshawar in each dynasty he said;
Yet he does not know where the Kawalis sing at night.
                          
I had never been to Khyber pass
 Or the Kabul river
Or where the Talibans stay
They are bad not because they carry Guns,
But because they paint my Allah black
with each heinous day in their pejorative calendar.

I am with Yasmin,
From the Hindi movies, I have learned to love
And look for references in the library
Where she waits for me with two ponytails;
Swinging to and fro, unlike the cascades they show in movies;
We have read Oliver Twist, Nancy Drew and Tintin together;
But forget every time how to tie our shoe laces.

In the classroom I was hiding under the desk,
When Miss Fatima swooshed her poonchy ponytail to scare me away
Before the scribbles of the illegible homework-
Lay a dormant seed of carnage
Dead before my eyes was the plant I had watered on Vanmahotsav day.

I forgot to use my copy once the bullet stroke away,
The last smiles form the minds ignited by Kalam.
I could hear the blackboard crying with the whitewashed ceiling-

In mode of whisper, lest they shall be fired at too.
I saw no Red, when they fired at us
All that was lying were the pencil chips and collages
For the Winter Fete next month
Only my brother Shamim was dreaming of ITHACA on the window pane,
With wide opened eyes towards the sun;
Capturing the last sunlight of the day;
And in his hand, a pencil raised as a toast
To the stolen lines of being,
Mightier
Of being Juicier,
In the years underneath,
And here on my beautiful little black coffin;
Pinned was my first poem-
“A For Apple
B For Ball
Muslims are Humans, Yasmin
The world shall never know at all.“

Indian Review | Literature & Poetry | Chandril Chattopadhyay