The following is a poem on love and the Bengali new year by S. Rupsha Mitra.

April 14th, 2024

I ponder on the Rasa of Shringaar and the contrasting Rasa of Vibhatsam I felt on last year’s Bengali new year.

Thinking of love and the dangerous spaces of heart is difficult indeed, how I had decided not to love again. Not to feel again fulgent wonder like the spicemist of memories washed away in heaviness of brishti or rain. How logic failed. Words couldn’t be uttered from the pinkness of mouth. But on a dawning day. It came back to me, all the past wounds healing like I am wearing safa wool and plunging into divine mysticism. When you called me, and referred to my authenticity. When you showed me the hearty labyrinthine pathways of Kolkata, bound with a love vibrant than moonstone. Wholesome like blood. Now I take a deep breath , my world turned an immersive experience of feeling, never worrying about the dilapidated vignettes of past, I think of love in a different way now -of the closeness in space, the calmness in distance, the beauty in silences midst both of us,

Neighborhood goinar dokan filled with batis of mithai, and how we recall age old memories,

You in your childhood, tightly holding your mother’s hand on the way to witness Halkatha, I in my childhood running after icecreams in gold shops and it’s such solace to rejuvenate those days,

In the wings of night, when everyone’s asleep, we restructure the gilded days of nabobarsha, isn’t it an eclipsed moment in time. A mysterious epiphany in rediscovering ourselves midst the arising frothy fun of forthcoming festivity.

I listen to you describing noboborsha, as if it was yesterday, you portraying the day as if you are cradling it as the silver pink weight of my body against you.

You enticing me with memories and wisdom and plethora of recollections,

That efface all the sadness of ribs, shoulders, neck, throat and tongue.

The sing song melodies traverse to me ushering happiness such that it’s tangibly intangible.

There’s a flavour to our recollection, not rusted, not chromatic, but stained with a thing we style connection in its purity. Stained with my emotions and your wet rationality . Yet again, arriving is a Naboborsho day, how I would have loved to spend it with you, as you would have wanted to spend it in the heart of your city midst family and me. I learn to leave longing and learn belonging to you. It’s a time when I become refaced again, learning to hold your hand, strengthening the unfolding skeins of our growing bond. Learning that trust can be so true, that I am so touched by you, you who emerges like my messiah everyday, that I am choked with moon flower, choked in the sensations, the evoking scent of you.

S. Rupsha Mitra is a writer based in India with works published in London Reader, Mekong Review, North Dakota Quarterly and Resonate. Her book, Smoked Frames, is out now with JLRB Press.