Tag Archives: India

Shamik Banerjee, ‘Memories of a Flood’

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For one full week, the sun was dead,
     unloosening the gray,
wild clouds that swamped each paddy bed—
     the plowman’s great dismay.

The regal night sky, once agleam,
     was purloined of its stars.
Each lane became a water stream.
     Dinghies replaced the cars.

Mazdoors, waist-hidden, waded to
     their distant factory sites.
The Tongas‘ (since they were a few)
     demand reached greater heights.

But our town did what it does best—
     it kept the hoo-ha going.
In every church and temple’s chest,
     hope’s candles were still glowing.

On the roadside estaminets,
     sports went with malt whisky,
and there were pleasant tête-à-têtes
     on every balcony.

Mazdoor: an unskilled labourer
Tonga: a light horse-drawn two-wheeled vehicle
‘Memories of a Flood’ was first published in the San Antonio Review..

Shamik Banerjee is a poet from Assam, India. Some of his recent publications include Spelt, Ink Sweat & Tears, St. Austin Review, Modern Reformation, San Antonio Review, The Society of Classical Poets, Third Wednesday, California Quarterly, and Amethyst Review, among others.

Photo: Times of India, July 5, 2024

Sonnet: Shamik Banerjee, ‘To Mr. Banerjee (Senior)’

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Without black tea, his mornings never start.
The newspaper should be upon his bed;
Not finding it will make his eyes all red.
As if examining a piece of art,
He reads each page. Loud oohs such as ‘My heart!’,
‘Another swindle!’, or ‘So many dead!’,
Are heard as if the earth’s weight’s on his head.
Harrumphing, he jumps to the Cultures part.
A pensioner today, back in those days,
He was a banker. Now, he saunters, plays
Carom with me, or spends the noontimes planting
Camellias —- a work he finds enchanting.
At times, he sits before some dusty files,
Puts on the glasses, thumbs through them, and smiles.

*****

First published by Borderless Journal.

Shamik Banerjee is a poet from Assam, India. Some of his recent publications include Spelt, Ink Sweat & Tears, Modern Reformation, San Antonio Review, The Society of Classical Poets, Third Wednesday, and Amethyst Review among others.

Photo: “Bentley Tea Cup” by snap713 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Shamik Banerjee, ‘The Auto Drivers of K.G. Street’

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They know well when I clock out. Sharp
At five, on K.G. Street,
They welcome me with every tooth
And lead me to their seat.

Five friends—senescent, pyknic, bald,
In Khakis—ironed, clean,
With brand-new autorickshaws that
Are painted taupe and green.

One masticates areca nuts.
The shortest one takes khaini.
The other two smoke beedis by
A tall Mahogany.

They fall in with a mental pact
That tells them not to seek
To win me, for each one’s assigned
A fixed day of the week

To drive me home. “Today’s my turn,”
One says and bids me in.
While driving he tells stories that
Block off the traffic’s din:

The student loan he’s willing to
Take for his only daughter;
The municipal board has swelled
The price of urban water.

Arrived, I ask about the fare.
“Ah! Saab“, he shyly says.
I take a fifty rupee note—
A glow upon his face.

*****

Shamik Banerjee gives the following word meanings:
“Khaki: A type of cloth.
Khaini: A type of chewable tobacco
Beedi: Indian cigarette
Saab: Sir
K.G. stands for Kasturba Gandhi, the wife of Mahatma Gandhi. Most streets/ lanes/ roads in India are named after famous personalities, especially those who fought for our freedom.” 
‘The Auto Drivers of K.G. Street’ was first published by Willow Review.

Shamik Banerjee is a poet from Assam, India, where he resides with his parents. His poems have been published by Sparks of Calliope, The Hypertexts, Snakeskin, Ink Sweat & Tears, Autumn Sky Daily, Ekstasis, among others. He secured second position in the Southern Shakespeare Company Sonnet Contest, 2024.

Photo: Auto Drivers in Guwahati, Assam.

Shamik Banerjee, ‘A Summer Evening’

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The sky begins to cloak its face,
Removing every streak of red.
Above, two weary fliers trace
The way back to their bough-held bed.

A boy, awash with joy, returns
Soil-vested from a football field.
To celebrate the victory earned,
He swaggers with his pride revealed.

Along the lined tobacco stands,
Pen-pushers at long last release
Workloads with cigarettes in their hands,
Exhaling little rings of peace.

Now earthen lamps begin to glow
In homes–it’s time for evening prayer.
Sweet wafts of scented incense flow,
Cleansing the jaded summer air.

*****

‘A Summer Evening’ was first published in 3rd Wednesday.

Shamik Banerjee is a young poet from Assam, India where he resides with his parents. His poems have been published by The Society of Classical Poets, The Hypertexts, Third Wednesday, Thimble, Ink Sweat and Tears, Shot Glass, and The Pierian, among others.

Photo: “Purity and” by HumanityAshore is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Shamik Banerjee, ‘A Meeting’

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We chose our old patisserie, Faheem’s,
One Monday noontime. Half the chairs were stacked.
The waiter Abdul’s smile displayed the fact
He knew our likes: fudge brownies with whipped cream.

Her clothes were simple, just a plain Salwar
Kameez—not what she mostly wore to meet me.
No dimples sat upon her cheeks to greet me;
Her body there, her mind was somewhere far

Away. “Must be a slight familial thing,”
I thought and asked, “A crossfire with your mother?
The usual hijinks by your puckish brother?”
It seemed no act or word of mine could bring

The truth out of her throat. After a pause,
She spoke (as if an old, corroded door,
Reluctant to be slid): “Just six months more.
My baba says it’s for my own good cause.

The boy’s an engineer from our own caste
With good emoluments.” She turned away
From me to hide her face, now moist and gray.
This news, like summer’s heat, wizened the last

Bright bloom of optimism in my heart.
“When is the day?” I wished to ask but could
Not voice a word — perhaps, for my own good;
Perhaps, to keep my soul a bit apart,

Veiled from the knowledge of her wedding date.
We sat, hands clasped, and watched the hour grow,
The people leave, the lightbulbs’ dimmish glow.
The food remained untouched on both our plates.

*****

Shamik Banerjee writes: “If, in the battle between love and societal norms, the latter wins, then no doubt humanity’s end days can be counted on fingers. My poem speaks about this battle and faintly (if not fully) gives a peek into my own experience of it. I hope it speaks to all those who lost the love of their lives to the hands of caste, salary, name, pride, honour, and religion.”

Shamik Banerjee is a poet from India. He resides in Assam with his parents. Some of his recent works will appear in York Literary Review, Willow Review, Thimble Lit, and Modern Reformation, to name a few.

Photo: “in the distance” by Viva La Marx is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: Shamik Banerjee, ‘A Lesson From Zaheer, Our Fishmonger’

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All things are measurable, son: the food
You have, the sprawling mains, for man has power
Over the world; He deems what’s bad or good;
Determines if a plant should wilt or flower.
But ordeals measure us—we take the test
Of mercy when affliction’s cavalry
Threatens to loot the kindness off one’s chest
As in the massacre of ’83,
When every lane had reeked of Muslim blood,
My Abba Jaan had fallen to the sword
Held by your neighbours; trembling on the mud,
He mumbled, “What’s my sin? My faith? O’ Lord,
Don’t charge them for their deeds.” Love was his wish
That lives through me, for I still feed them fish.

*****

Shamik Banerjee writes: “This poem was first published in Fevers of the Mind. The incident described by our fishmonger is the Nellie Massacre, which took place in central Assam (an Indian state) during a six-hour period on February 18, 1983. The massacre claimed the lives of 1,600–2,000 people. The victims were all Muslims. Abba Jaan is an affectionate term for one’s father (used by Muslims).”

Shamik Banerjee is a poet from India. He resides in Assam with his parents. When he is not writing, he can be found strolling the hills surrounding his homestead. His poems have appeared in Fevers of the Mind, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Westward Quarterly, among others and some of his poems are forthcoming in The Hoogly Review, Dreich and Sparks of Calliope.

Photo: “Old man inside Jamu Masjid, Fatapur Sikri” by nilachseall is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Amit Majmudar, ‘To the Hyphenated Poets’

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Richer than mother’s milk
is half-and-half.
Friends of two minds,
redouble your craft.

Our shelves our hives, our selves
a royal jelly,
may we at Benares and Boston,
Philly and Delhi

collect our birthright nectar.
No swarm our own,
we must be industrious, both
queen and drone.

Being two beings requires
a rage for rigor,
rewritable memory,
hybrid vigor.

English herself is a crossbred
mother mutt,
primly promiscuous
and hot to rut.

Oneness? Pure chimera.
Splendor is spliced.
Make your halves into something
twice your size,

your tongue a hyphen joining
nation to nation.
Recombine, become a thing
of your own creation,

a many-minded mongrel,
the line’s renewal,
self-made and twofold,
soul and dual.

*****

Editor’s comments: Being Anglo-Danish from birth and with the subsequent acquisition of other passports, I am naturally biased in favour of multiculturalism. It was interesting a couple of months ago to hear Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman say “Multiculturalism has failed.” As one commentator noted, “She’s descended from Goan Indians from Mauritius and Kenya, married to a Jewish husband, and is in a senior cabinet position in a government headed by Britain’s first Hindu PM, himself the son of immigrants… Hello???” Suella Braverman left the cabinet shortly after.

Indians in particular, having been invaded and occupied by the Portuguese, French and British in the past couple of centuries, have used those connections to move out into the world – not just as entrepreneurs, but also in the arts, sciences… and politics. In mid-2023 the Prime Ministers of Ireland, Mauritius, Portugal and the UK, and the Presidents of Guyana, Mauritius, Seychelles, Singapore, Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago, all had Indian origins.

Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. He is the author of twenty books so far in a variety of categories, with different bodies of work published in the United States and in India.
His poetry collections include 0’, 0’ (Northwestern, 2009), shortlisted for the Norma Faber First Book Award, and Heaven and Earth (2011, Storyline Press), which won the Donald Justice Prize. These volumes were followed by Dothead (Knopf, 2016) and What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020). His poems have won the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in the Norton Introduction to Literature, The New Yorker, and numerous Best American Poetry anthologies as well as journals and magazines across the United States, UK, India, and Australia. Majmudar also edited, at Knopf’s invitation, a political poetry anthology entitled Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now.
One of Majmudar’s forthcoming volumes is a hybrid of prose, drama, and poetry, entitled Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2024). A new poetry collection is forthcoming from Knopf in 2026.

For links to Majmudar’s Nonfiction, Fiction, Mythology and Translations, please see his website.

Photo by Ami Buch Majmudar.

Teaching ESL with Songs and Poems

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Babies learn by play and imitation. Children learn by play and imitation. There is no reason this isn’t the easiest way for adults to learn, as well (and I speak as someone who has made a successful career of using board games to teach business finance rapidly and enjoyably).

The imitation of language, with a baby learning to speak, is enhanced by repetition–not just simple sentences and phrases used again and again, but also lullabyes and nursery rhymes. The advantages to songs and poems are that they are engaging to the ear (even if the words are not understood); that they are repeated virtually identically each time the same person sings or recites them; that the repetition and music, the rhythm and rhyme, make it easy to learn; learning then moves from passive (understanding) vocabulary to active (speaking) vocabulary; and the word-for-word learning teaches the structure of the language, the syntax, the grammar, as well as basic vocabulary and playful other words.

The principles are no different for someone learning a second language, whether as a child or an adult. To make the process engaging, to develop active use of the language with a confident vocabulary and grammar, there is nothing better for the beginner than songs and poems. Recorded music is fine–then the repetition will always be exact, and learning to sing simple songs (The Beatles’ ‘Hello Goodbye’ comes to mind) will contribute to developing a native speaker’s accent. With ESL–English as a Second Language–you may need to decide if you want the Queen’s English, or Liverpool, or Nashville, or what.

But singing isn’t always a practical solution. In that case, look at the resources developed for ESL teachers. Here is a webpage developed by the British Council and the BBC. And here for teens and adults is an excellent website with ‘Popular Poems to Teach‘. Note that most of the poems (though not all) whether British or American are using rhyme and metre. And this, again, is because those factors make it easier to learn things by heart–and that is what songs and poems will achieve: learning not just words and rules, but rather entire sentences with their grammar and vocabulary, learnt by singing or reciting, far more enjoyably than by studying lists and charts.

And the advantage is universal. Songs and poetry are part of the human experience, whether you come from China, India, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria or Brazil. Learning to sing or recite in English is not to start again from scratch, but to enjoyably refresh a childhood experience, a skill that has already been mastered.

Photo: “Wittenberg International Student Party” by Matt Cline is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0