ASSIGNMENT - Bhaskar Roy Barman
Bhaskar Roy Barman
So much obsessed with a piece of work
devolved upon me and fed up with it,
I felt as if I were waving my hand at a shadowgraph
to walk a bit slow to have me catch up with it.
Hard at work, I got habituated to the scampering of mice
in the holes scattered around the walls, though.
I found myself visualizing a phakir of old
meditating in the silence and loneliness of the river.
indistinct and flitting fragments of memory
kept haunting my mind groping for an impetus
to finish off the piece of work.
Yonder in the station a train whistled a warning
to stray passengers to get in
and threw splinters around to pierce
through the silence of the night.
Fed up of the silence and the loneliness of the house
- I had rented the house to work in -
I wished I had not taken up the assignment
