Swan's Labyrinth

Portraits of Disillusion

“Do the numbers speak when they are spoken to?”

The ceiling bellows at dawn:

Somehow tenderly as the wilderness crumbles in deep slumber.

She picks up the fingers of a deft mind and pirouettes with figurative art.

Archaism- her old friend from the late-night bar across the street-

Sips a pint next to her on the rustic table,

Whilst the innuendos of jazz strewn over its forehead blur her gaze in the lonesome lights.

Unbeknownst to the common folk, the flimsy and svelte visage of the girl in the polaroid,

Asks for a hand in painting her prosaic archetype in tomorrow’s pipe dream.

She claims that she seeks a limpid background and not too many ideas.

The elephant in the room fiddles with her consternation where her sullen eyes may lack,

And the colours she gleaned from dreamscapes she conjectured in the books she hides beneath her bed,

Simmer beyond the rays of sunlight mirrored in the simple ways of her unkempt hair.

The brushes screech as the needles affixed to the cotton swabs lacerate the wound-up mosaic from a fortnight ago.

Gusts of wind reach and assail her sorry heart,

Which pounds frantically in the dead of winter.

Fluttering wings of thought shove her easel to the ground;

She thaws her jolted, frozen palms with her tears,

Grazes her eyelashes across the skin she soon scratches apart,

And whilst the sketches on the walls nonplussed the fire in her mind,

She swam across the tides of time and swerved the avalanches of space.

Whistling unto the ends of the earth, my love cries into the cushions atop her desk,

And dials the number she cannot reach.

Stranded, she hunts and trails along the lines of contempt.

She sways in bereft riverbeds at the back of my shoulders,

Clutching on the nearest shores that drift apart from my control,

And lies on the entropic surfaces of the clouds overhead.

My sight lingers in the glades beyond the sky-

She ushers the hues of insuperable deceits of her past lovers,

Towards the sanctity that she paints inside the cloudburst.

Fomenting the agony in her chest, the blood spattered across the flinching eyelids of cremated bodies creep into her crestfallen canvas.

Reddened by the solitary sanctuaries dug into her chest,

Harrowed by the murky grass underneath her frame,

She smothers her canvas in tints of greige.

“Do the numbers speak when they are spoken to?”

The ceiling bellows at dusk:

Somehow tenderly as the wilderness ameliorates amidst feeble noises.

She never picks up her paintbrushes again.

~ Riddhi Chakraborty

Notes: extended metaphor is 100% my new best friend!

Questions by my Morning Latte

There are questions that I have scribbled on the tissue paper lying on this coffee table:

Words that scrimmage with the numbers in the sealed boxes that I have built inside my head,

Alongside the scaffolding and barricades that scurry past the rivers of obliterated dreams.

The flowers that I pluck from the stories burrowed in these grounds that placate my rage are crushed and bitten away by the concrete,

But the slow trains- steady and quiet- draw caricatures of the shimmers of past lives;

They somehow meander like the butterflyfish in the sea I dove into at nightfall,

And like the grim star shine broadening over the mountains.

I listen to the music of my mistakes-

The symphony that binds my hopes and my regrets,

And the treading harp strings over the muddy powder that I have sprinkled atop my blunders.

I watch as they duel for space but settle in time,

And the whiff of coffee hushes the music like a gritty alarm.

The bicycle outside the café is a stationery memory on the footpath,

And I blow the tissue across the drudgery of haphazardly parked extravagant cars,

Till it lands inside the pink basket of the bicycle and soaks in the scorching sun rays.

I walk away from the scathing jeers that I drink in my morning caffè latte,

The blisters of my nightmares that I sight on the turnstile,

The grudge of thriving boulders that shake my hands and hug me for selfish sympathy,

And the jars of wood laden with my silent tears.

I walk like a maple leaf on the dewy grass

Beside the girl who trudges with her punctured bicycle;

She takes me home and tucks me to bed, and presses my palm with all the answers to my questions.

She is the wind clasped in the curtains,

Till she whispers that she is me;

And I watch as she dims my gaze

And slips into my dreams-

Where I can be sure of who I am-

I am just who I love to be.

~ Riddhi Chakraborty

Notes: is it ironic that i write about morning musings at late night?

Bharatanatyam: An Art and An Emotion

When you are five-year-old, born into a Bengali household, you are more likely than not already attending five different extra curricular classes. Needless to say, I was no exception in this case. I still remember my mother sitting me down next to her on the sofa, one fine day, to explain the significance of dance in building “human character.” Obviously, there is not much downplaying you can do to explain the depths of human character to a five-year-old except tell her that dance will make her legs strong and help her stand for a long time especially, if she wishes to become a school teacher one day. So, the next day I was inside a dance class with ten other girls, wearing a salvar-kameez and bindi, with no idea whatsoever about Bharatanatyam and what I am going to learn in this subject.

Now, eleven years later, I sit and wonder how things would have turned out if I never in fact had stepped foot into that class. I recently read a quote by Kumudini Lakhia which said that an inhibited mind and body cannot bring out the expressive abandon of dance. Besides finding your feet, you also should find a voice and vision. Whilst dance continues to be one of the best stress-busters amidst the daily hustle and bustle, the enrichment, discipline, challenge and commitment associated with especially classical dance are the diminishing elements that compel divine art forms like Bharatanatyam to gradually fizzle out.

There is no denying that we live in a fast-paced, digital world wherein we demand activities to be engaging, fun, entertaining and enjoyable- where our attention span is limited to a ten second hook-step on the most trending song and a pun that would barely exceed fifteen words. Albeit dance classes can be enjoyable, they are fundamentally a learning environment where discipline, precision, consistency, focus, and the thirst to learn thrive. Bharatanatyam is a form of classical dance that requires a degree of will-power to pick up challenges and face the monotony and repetition of each class. There is no such thing as “perfect” or “100 per cent” in art. Whether you give it your best shot or not, what makes all the difference in your journey as an artist or a student is your resolve to do better and be better than the last time. As my Guru would repeat in every class, “Classical is the mother of all art forms,” to be able to learn this art is a blessing that transcends the fulfilment of the mind and the soul, and gifts the student with a gravitas that will shine the brightest in every room.

I remember watching a friend’s arangetram the previous year and leaving the auditorium with teary eyes. When I passed my Visharad-Purna examination and walked out of my class, I felt out of sorts and poignant as I had to grapple with my urge to wear my salvar, bindi and retrace my steps to class. It was an unforeseen moment in time when I had to internalize the fact that Bharatanatyam to me is not just an art but an emotion. It gave my imagination, my feelings and my thoughts a voice; alongside learning to let go of my inhibitions, somewhere between the complex footwork and evocative abhinaya I found my real self. Nonetheless, there is no fixed point where your journey ends. My Guru once told us “Ek zindagi kaafi nahi hai,” and through every tiny creek and crevice in my regular schedule as a high-school student, I always find a way back to Bharatanatyam.

So perhaps, the only way to to end this rough scrap of writing would be in gratitude: for being one of the extremely fortunate who gets to resonate with classical art and channelize her emotions through a myriad of divine choreographies and also to form a fragment of the small ratio of classical dancers that find joy in discipline and commitment. It is not easy to stick around with unwavering determination while learning classical dance but for every one who does, it is beyond just the best accomplishment to have earned by the sweat of their brow. Happy International Dance Day to every student, teacher, dancer and five year old who steps into a dance class because their mom said so.

~ Riddhi Chakraborty

Old Habits

Things that happened in a second:

[ he is cowering against the shadows of rusted needles-

blood congealed on his scarred face,

gleaming with the smouldering linen off his mother’s stole-

he lights his cigarette and glowers at the pictures on the wall.

face ashen from the perpetual nightmares at the church, he returns to his dingy apartment,

and scans his room that reeks of her memories:

the crocheted coasters atop the bedside table,

and the pillows she laid her head on;

the fleeced sweaters that she bought for him,

and the notebook she drew his portraits on.

there are waves hidden beneath these tiles of marble,

and a ceasing gust of wind behind these walls;

the smoke billowing out of his cigarette hides a memory,

and he freezes the sight of his flimsy eyes staring back at him in the mirror,

till the grief wears off his chest,

but memories of old habits are not frozen.

they change;

like his pillow covers every weekend-

every new version is a new era,

suited to his overdue survival,

and his classic new habits evict the deleterious nature of life;

hanging by a sliver of light that peeks through the keyhole,

and drunk from the emptiness of love,

he blinks away a dimensionless pain,

and sinks in the capsule of time-

ticking away like the waning cigarette between his fingers,

blurring the flames of her name that chime

in his sleep,

like how the silence of old habits lingers ]

A second passes.

~ Riddhi Chakraborty

Notes: grief is a pattern that repeats itself each passing second; and perhaps whilst overcoming a certain aspect of distress, grieving becomes an old habit carved somewhere in our DNA. a character from the book that i am reading currently inspired this piece.

365 in Black and White

Not the film reel clutched in the branches of my past,

But a scarred chitter of the robin at the break of dawn,

Gliding across the silhouette of a day and a night- both forgotten species of the stars-

And ambushing the velvet jars of moonbeams gasping for air; a speckle of a feather frightfully flown!

I breathe on a Monday morning, steady as a fish in a fishbowl;

Morph a little into the poignant chairs on the dining table in the living room.

Was a mundane Saturday just a preface to this jittery novel?

The sycamores treading on the plight of the innocent soul,

Smile selfishly at the grating sunlight on the abrasive mirrors in this hotel room-

Just a tapestry of plaintive syllables; an insipid ensemble,

Boorishly feigning the class of a gauche carousel and an opulent debacle.

I am alight in the furnace of pavements trodden in this dreamscape;

The buds of gardenia in the withering garden- exult by the flames of blood.

Swerving past the auto-correct of the larks in the digital letter, I plunge into the translucent drapes;

Written on this slate of empty wishes is a pitfall of charred, handsome mud.

When the flagon of glory slips into the silence of unbridled glass,

The colours slumber past midnight across the dreary three hundred and sixty-five;

But the sturdy one wakes up and stumbles and hunts for the film strips in the grass.

I pluck the petals off the pink magnolia on the crosswalk- he loves me still, he loves me not.

Just a sacred string of rusted metal between the crumpled pages where the butterflies scrive,

Bled in the memories of a smouldering cigarette in an ashtray of brass;

The promises that gaze the subdued trickles of tears on the window-panes of cars in the parking lot,

Soon vanquished with a giggle at the joke on the filter of this story that is better lost than caught.

Not a dreary adage of the old textbooks in this bitter stack of pills on a glazed table;

Just a company along the way of this rickety, undulating hindsight over this blocked mind.

With an incandescent euphemism in the paintings of this auction of wisdom,

Clothed in the ribbons of entropic diamonds in the curveting rubble-

Indecisive on my feet: just a glimpse of the crevice on what to lose and what to find.

The tiles of these days were brittle for a nosedive into the lonesome chasm,

To realize a three hundred and sixty-five was nothing but a half-written poem.

~ Riddhi Chakraborty

Notes: a yearly ritual: an ode to those bleak 365 days that went by in a trice- 2023, you were… weird. ❤

A Sunday Evening

( tw // suicide implied )

Here is a broken sentence
Of a broken story:

The light poles across this city
Waver in the oceans beneath
And I walk in silent steps that
Resound a flaky dream.
There is a girl in blue denim-
Her hair deluged in saffron-
Echoing my name in between musical notes
And I dance to mellifluous memories
Because I know of no time abound
In a city that knows no infinity.

I bask in the artificial words that weave these beams of yellow light bulbs
These words that mould my nights into a dreamscape
Ebbing away with the dust that scathes my skin,
Clasp the waning smudges of lipstick on the mirror
Atop the clouds that dissolve in the ink swallowing the sky.

On a Sunday evening when the quietude was stifling,
The city was a Renaissance painting,
The hours that slipped were ordinary,
And a dawdling poem was scribbled on my notes;
The questions were smothering a rupture in a flurry of expectations
And so I wished to end the life in a plastic bag.

Here are blotches of tears that were spurned
A tender smile and a humane colloquy etched on the shredded pages of a notebook
And a deep, seething wound beneath what meets the eye

Voices;
Not enough, not enough, not enough
Misery, misery, misery
Too much, too less
Too pretty, too young
Too foolish, too immature
Too selfish, too nice
Bad planning, bad timing, bad speaking
Bad interests, bad talent, bad pursuits
Bad grades, bad clothes, bad progress
Bad leader, bad member, bad student
Bad friend, bad girlfriend, bad daughter
Bad human.

A background score of a favourite song
Dying away as eyelids swell
A warm breeze of yearning from a human miles away
Dying away as mouth screams
A promise of a hushed woman in the corner
Dying away as tremors of head disintegrate the plastic bag
But withers away in the silent earthquake of the heart.

Nevertheless,
Just a wish.

Notes:

One cannot make arbitrary conclusions about a person based on what meets their eye or upon a listen to one side of the story. A human being is multi-faceted; no one knows what happens with a certain someone on the other end of their daily life as well as within their mind. Sometimes the people we trust the most are the reason we think so little of ourselves. Sometimes, we don’t see the point of living on anymore. It feels like the end of the world when a catalogue of your failures, your insecurities, your past is warped and distorted to be etched upon your skin and that is exactly when you wish to end the life in a plastic bag. But at the end, the wish remains a wish, and the life lies still choking on heaps of microplastic.

Things (un)said in a Glitch

Telephone rings

Hello?

(static) your voice is the old bottle of wine that burns down my throat and i bite the dust in my dreams till i wake up unhinged with the wine stains on my shirt spelling out your name

Hel-

my hydrangeas have all wilted and conflated with the mud that smears my threshold and the hyacinths that you left that day on my upholstery the last time i ever saw your face haven’t fluttered ever since and i discern your ghost that disfigures my mind into stones apiece till all i can do is sit and watch the flowers wither away with time

I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I’m afraid I didn’t catch you.

give me a minute for my blood has congealed with the pining that gnaws at my wrinkled skin

(indistinct murmur)

had the sky lost all of its shine one day, the hues that would besprinkle the vast canvas you’d claim your own when you’d stand on rooftops with your hands stretched out begging the unscathed glimmer to return will simmer against my skin and i would betray every healing wound just to see you smile.

had thursday afternoons felt like all your fears peeking in through your windows while you lay in your bed as lifeless as the pencil over the poem you left unfinished and the ceiling fan would creek every second till the only sound you’ll hear when a whisper of love brushes against your ears is the perennial screech of your fears but i would brave every bullet of the scorching rays and bleed myself dry till i efface your dread and see you survive.

had the four walls of your home crushed you into bits and throttled every piece of life out of you and you would scream and rage in blaring silence i would let the storm clouding around you shatter me instead because for you i would leave every form of peace untouched just so you can peel off your silence and speak in unbridled glory.

Hello? Hey, could you perhaps try calling again? I believe the connection’s glitching at your end.

i ache for you like the little girl that treads on at the turnstile alongside the shadow that is not her own and i will love you till she morphs into that smoky silhouette. goodbye, love.

Wait, hold on-

[beep]

{loud static}

[beep]

You have a voicemail

~ Riddhi Chakraborty

Notes: what reading macabre stories and poems lately has done to me.

erratic excerpts,

i love how the silence

can sing the unspoken

but i shun it all

for i am just a glitch

in the music

~ a broken guitar string

i am poetry scribbled in haste

and bottled up in seashells

ebbing away in waves

eternally searching for the shore

~ mind’s fugitive

from two worlds apart

your tears bled into mine

and our souls snapped in two

but it kills me to know

that you’re safe still

and i am not

~ falling apart

it’s a tragedy

to have to blend in with reality

when all you are able of

is transcending

~ vagabond

am i loved enough

to be understood

to the core?

~ a desperate little thing

flashbacks tame and tarnish pieces of me

and i realize parting

is only an adage when it’s an entity

but a bitter pill when it’s a memory

~ letting go

i am a bouquet of expectations

strewn across their silhouettes

withholding petals of flaws

disdained and accursed

but flourishing in artificial sunlight

~ a pretty disappointment

can i just teeter out of the entropic waves that i am drowning in

just to feel what it would be like to be someone perfect

be in someone else’s body and mind

and feeling the kind of happiness i never felt

before the waves of self-induced entropy swallow me

~ self-loathing

and somehow

i am just a speckle of ambrosia

pirouetting in empty hallways

a whisper dissolved in each floor tile

hoping that maybe

you’d recognize me

~ saudade metaphors

between dreary heartbeats

did we love and try to forget

but with each palpation

and tangible sweet nothing

we let this cliché

become permanent wishful thinking

~ lover

~Riddhi Chakraborty

Notes: few short poems i wrote during sleepless nights

On a Train Downtown

I saw you stumble on the way to your seat on the train downtown.

Your abashed giggle, your frantic look-see from pillar to post; your quick and agile steps towards your seat as you act like nothing happened, just momentarily.

I saw you doze your head on the train downtown.

A pencil in your hand and a notepad on your lap; an unfinished sketch of people you saw in your dream; you waking up minutes later and dozing back again in brief intervals of time.

I saw you open your lunch box on the train downtown.

A wistful moment of the sweet smile creeping on your face; the memories of your mother cooking your favourite food flooding back into your eyes- just the perfect relish of the most beautiful kind of love.

I saw you exchange sweet nothings on the telephone on the train downtown.

Your cheeks turning an ardent red; your smile- a ray of sunshine; your eyes glimmering in the haze of ardour; time tethers you to them and dwindles with every ceasing railway track.

I saw you lay your head on his shoulder on the train downtown.

Your grey hair; your fleeced sweaters; your intertwined hands; your dim and mellow smiles morphing into each other as you travel away thither, whilst life slips away by-and-by.

I saw you crying on the train downtown.

Your earphones plugged in; your head resting on the windowsill; your quivering lips; your dewy eyes, your cascading tears; the throbbing pain in your chest reverberating louder every agonizing minute.

I boarded the train downtown.

An epiphany that struck gratuitously:

How I almost didn’t notice the way you squint your eyes when you smile,

How I almost didn’t notice the way you tap your foot frenetically when you’re nervous,

How I almost didn’t notice the way you part with reality when you read,

How I almost didn’t notice the way the wisp of wind brushes against your hair,

How I almost didn’t notice the way you heave a heavy sigh before you cry,

How I almost didn’t notice your rustic humanness that stood the test of time.

You echo with each breath:

“Don’t throw your humanness away

For material miracles that contort and fade.

We’re bound by time;

We just need to find a way to live in fleeting moments,

Fill up each one of them with life-

Just a human being human.”

~ Riddhi Chakraborty

Notes: Deserved more than an ‘unfinished draft’ tag.

Deformation and Discombobulation

I have broken and broken down enough to be broken down forever, yet I live and live on and live a lifetime of regret and self-loathing in one day

One day my pearls strewn across the table-top shoot me like daggers till my mouth bleeds of the words I should’ve spoken and the words I heedlessly spoke and the words I shamelessly shrouded from them all

All I do is try and try and try away and fall and fall and fall again and again

And again the rustle of every page sends shivers down my spine and I dream of running away, escaping from the shattering edges of my potential and the prickling agony that swells and thrives and spreads and kills slowly but surely and I..

And I live on in misery and my knees buckle at the sight of my reflection and I..

And I relinquish and I cry out it pain, “Help!” but I remain deadlocked in my puddle of tears, screaming and shrieking for something, really something, something really real wherefore I have a voice nevermore and nothing to cry out for and I sleep and sleep again and I..

And I wounded the best and embraced the worst and stumbled in class till I fell and never stood up again and I was stuck, about to fall apart in a tempestuous circumstance but I never said what I should’ve in the first place yet I blink away the tears

The tears that consume me entirely and I tumble into the perpetually incensed chasm of stabbing pain, stabbing hurt, stabbing agony

Agony leads me to cliffs and dead-ends. “I can’t breathe anymore!” Oh, what I would do to make this end

End the insurmountable uproar outraging in my mind and shun the blinding kaleidoscopic flashes of the film reel

The film reel I rewind like a hasty child because I bask in the past when I shone like a sequined gown on a dull night

The dull night that I miss so acutely, so fervently, so intensely

So intensely do I miss the night skies painted in starry hues and the moonbeam plunging into the lapping lake-water and the breeze rendering it so quiet, so tender, so calm, so perfect and I sit there

I sit there- a bundle of serenity and charm wrapped in bones and flesh and she beckons the messier me- the disheveled and unkempt version that limps a little and stares lifelessly with dewy eyes and I sit next to her and so much goes unspoken in the silence but so much is watched and observed upon till she whispers

She whispers, “You’re trying, you’re trying, you’re trying…”

“I’m trying, please I’m trying, I’m trying.”

“Please help me wake up.”

( I never do )

~ Riddhi Chakraborty

Notes: An ode to every mental and nervous breakdown I had in the middle of the night.