The names lick stamps — they declare desire, an urgent abandonment of distance. There are reasons: an overdose of literacy, a compulsive reading of subtitles, so that when the eye now migrates from screen to person, it looks for a ticker. Everywhere the slap of script: hoardings, billboards, phone notifications, social media posts, emails and messages, pay slips, menu cards, feedback, appraisal. The mind longs for moments close to one’s birth when one was free of compulsive literacy. It wants to rest on those who live outside literacy: ripples, dew, grass, shadow, cloud.
But I still read the names as I pass through Dinajpur. It’s like I am reading a book of poems, once familiar, its pages now made brittle by the irreversible distance between childhood and the many stations of adulthood. Taltala. Tetultala. ‘Tala’, the suffix — where is the historian who would give us an Alt history of the Indian subcontinent by documenting the life of those who sat under its trees? Not just the men, turned wise by this preposition, the indulgence and benevolence of shade and silence, but others, lesser-known and unknown, an anonymous collective of human and dog
and other shade-seeking citizens. Such names are to be found everywhere — Neemtala, Aamtala, Pakurtala — even though the trees have been amputated, their shades turned scrawny, or murdered by the goons of capitalism. Here the trees still stand, even though they might not be those that gave birth to the name. The names are not a citizenship register — of plants that lived here, whose progeny must be allowed residency by the country’s laws of inheritance. They are a history of this land, which we often equate with country (‘my native land’) without a thought about other species who share its soil with us.
I think I laugh when I say Taltala in my head. To imagine a taal, the palmyra fruit, falling on the head of someone sitting under its tree is to experience nervousness, of the kind that Newton wouldn’t have had to imagine under an apple tree. The injury of a heavy fruit falling on the head, particularly one whose size and weight nearly match the human skull, has given birth to a Bangla proverb, of course — a person with a shaven head doesn’t go under a stone apple tree twice. To live here is to become reacquainted with oneself regularly, one’s body, on which fruit might fall, the plant and animal life, to remember that it is from this soil and water and air and light, its personality and idiosyncrasies, that our vocabulary has had its birth. Is that why I stop the car at Paranpur village? Paran, a homely pronunciation of ‘pran’, meaning both life and breath. A pond, and, behind it, another, holding dismembered parts of the sky; on its skin scratches of green, floating leaves, so tiny that when they move it seems that the pond is breathing. My eyes close from aaram, from the mind’s recognition of leisure.
Haystack, no less interesting than a temple spire, but without its permanence, that robs it of a place in history. Paths laid by human feet, never a straight line, never repaired, as roads are with stone and tar, therefore unavailable on Google maps. Creepers and vines climbing up everything without discrimination, pipe and pole and plants, and, if they could, people. Their bodies reject the permanence of pen and ink that drives historiography — every now and then, they are brought down on to the earth, where they lie like clumps of hair at a barber’s shop. Hibiscus, red and pink and yellow, their stigma and style, like a Jack-in-the-box, always surprising the air. Flowers, whose names I don’t know, whose names they themselves don’t know, of course, collected into bouquets with a name like ‘Fulbari’. For all across Bengal, and certainly in its north, are many settlements with such a name: Fulbari, what might have tickled such a baptism? The shock of flowers, their abundance, the Wordsworthian “ten thousand saw I at a glance”? Bahicha; Bahicha, whose sound makes me wonder whether it owes to ‘bagicha’, garden, but whose etymology might be more local and, therefore, unrevealed to me. Jambari, Dalimgaon, Kamlabari Haat, the black plum, pomegranate, orange in their names. Kulik, birdsong in the near-palindromic name.
There are not just the flowers. Leaves, more than there will ever be stars in the sky. Leaves, their double life, one side glossy, charming the light, the underside paler, like our palms are, like everything is, including our minds and hearts, when kept unexposed to life. They fall continuously, tiny dead leaves, like spores falling from the trees, as if the breeze was a byproduct of the trees themselves, their secretion. They land on the bodies of the gods and goddesses that human hands are making — mixing with straw and clay and air and water, they become gods themselves, worshipped without knowledge. The abundance of water and air in the nomenclature — Joradighi, Kaldighi, Tungidighi, Nalagola, Bataskuri. And always, always, the surprise of the privilege of birth — really, I was born here?
That invisibility is part of its culture here, of adoration and worship, an acceptance of absence, knowing it not as loss but as intrinsic to love and being. The many temples of the Chhinnamasta, her severed head in her hand; the local names by which the Hindu gods are worshipped, the functional everydayness of the baptisms — Nyakra Kali, a small temple where people have tied a rag to hold their wish, to which they will return after the fulfilment of their prayer. Locks on bridges for the same purpose in European cities, locks that outlive the lifespan of wishes and wishers; rags tied urgently and hurriedly by passers-by, posting telegrams to the goddess by tearing off an end of a saree, this is how I imagine it originated. Bashkuriya, Siyalpara, bamboo groves and jackals, how they once lived in children’s stories. Where are we to find these histories?
Bibhutibhushan catalogued the plant life on the banks of the Ichhamati in a novel because he knew that it wouldn’t find a place in history books; Ocean Vuong the lives of forsaken Vietnamese women and their children, also in a novel, because their stories would never be taught by history teachers in American schools. This is only an op-ed.
Sumana Roy is a poet and author