by Sayan Aich Bhowmik

Nostalgia is the human race’s Janus-faced old companion — simultaneously looking forward, with someone or something constantly tugging at us from behind. Giving in to it is not a luxury but sometimes the order of the day, providing us with the wisdom of knowing who we are, the “roots” and “routes” that have gone into the making of it. In a world so fraught with conflict and displacement, it is only natural that more and more narratives would emerge that talk of these two R’s. Stories churned out from the oeuvre of survival and settlement, need to be passed on to the next set of readers and listeners, lest they are lost in the official and overarching historiography of a nation.

Bhaswati Ghosh’s debut collection of poems, Nostalgic for A Place Never Seen is about all this and much more. Growing up in New Delhi and now living in Canada, Ghosh traverses and inhabits multiple worlds—cities of her childhood and adulthood, towns she has visited during her travels, villages she hasn’t but whose sight and sound have been made real by her grandmother’s storytelling.

The collection is divided into multiple sections but the quiet river that runs through them all and holds the collection together is a longing for a place never seen and for places where the poetic voice hasn’t been. Ghosh’s places are sensuous spaces, worlds of sight and sounds punctuated and defined by stories and their retelling from memory, where personal history, anecdotes, and laments swirl and jostle. This act is as much for recording as it is for preservation. Take for instance the closing lines of the poem First Flush—

“The heart is but a travelling historian.”

One must also be aware of the performative aspect of this preservation and the race against the chariots of time to ensure these stories are not lost. Ghosh poignantly writes in the poem Ageing Wine—

Fine wine,
they call it. We call it nostalgia.
We call it love.

With the rise of totalitarian forces and governments, giving into nostalgia cannot be dismissed as an exercise of indolence and indulgence. Rather it becomes an attempt at creating a museum of artifacts and lost traditions, ranging from the sartorial to the culinary. Bhaswati Ghosh in her debut novel Victory Colony:1950 had dealt with the trauma of displacement. But for the displaced, what gave them a sense of community and belonging was their culinary exercise—it was in the makeshift kitchen in the refugee camps that they were holding on to the vestige of a country no longer their own. Such reminiscing is an important motif in Ghosh’s world. In the poem, Displaced Persons’ Colony, she writes —

That afternoon, I learned hunger on
a hot summer day can turn your brother
into a fast-track cook in a semi-constructed kitchen.
That a meal of steaming rice and hot potatoes
can surpass any other in the world.

When one is writing poems from memory, there is always this danger of the narrative exposing the gap and distance between intention and execution. But reading Ghosh’s poems one is overwhelmed by the sensuality of it all—as if the poems were written on the threshold of the courtyard, the kitchen door, or in the comfort of the quilt in the winter sun. Be it the poem Cumin or Arabian Jasmine, one is accosted by the sound and smell of the world that Ghosh presents—the sizzling of cumin seeds in the simmering oil and the wafting of jasmine wrapping the entire evening in her arms. The strong imagery is steeped in the daily, lived reality that does justice to the burden of years of separation and trauma. The poems end with a punch, like a sudden explosion of taste and smell. Ghosh has both the eye and ear the everyday, the trivial, the minute and the seasonal. The sentences are measured, yet have a gravitas that promises to establish itself beyond the discipline and rigor of the poetic exercise. Grandmothers and dwelling places appear and disappear, speaking to us, speaking of us—of lost time, lost countries and geographies and postal codes, and slowly vanishing people. Take for instance, the poem, Temporary and Permanent —

My grandmother gave us her village address
noted with peripheral markers. Spatial jigsaws.
Sprawling fruit orchards, a pond ‘as big as a river.’
the temple my brother found
pieces of when he visited
the village years after
Grandma died
pining for it.

Ghosh’s poems examine cities and people as if under a microscope, trying to map the different moods and shades of places strewn across the globe. Physical spaces occupy a large section of this collection, because so much of what has been lost and pined for is associated with them. The exploration underlines the desire to experience and belong and carry a little bit of places and people away with the self. At the same time, the subtle realization lurks in the background that this might not be completely possible.

If there is personal lament of lost cities and relations in these poems, there is also greater and more universal ramifications in this current age. Poems like Things I Imagine Telling My Niece and Wrapping Love bat for personal choice and agency regarding what one should wear, eat, read and speak about. The poems are as much about seeking as they are with the way knowledge will be preserved and disseminated. Language and dialects recalled from memory have almost been stowed away in glass jars, almost pickled for later consumption and posterity.

 The poems seem to have been sat with, carefully polished and chipped at and then presented with utmost care. There is seldom a sense of “spontaneous overflow” but rather a child who has been brought up with the time s/he deserves and much more. It is difficult to read through this collection in a couple of reading sessions. It makes you think, ponder and meditate. Especially for those who have inherited trauma of separation, riots and communal fragmentation, it also speaks to those now separated from their land, either through voluntary or forced exile —nostalgia is their closest confidant and also the enemy that knows them the best.