Writings / Creative Non-Fiction: Prosenjit Dey Chaudhury

Pages: 1 2 3

Spread the love

When the city is under snow it is not easy to remember the looks it sported in the time of sun and green. You need to force yourself to think that memory is not being perfidious in suggesting that here in these thickly decked albuminous locales there lay whole stretches of lush lawn and overhanging vegetation when you passed by some months ago. Sometimes you think that whole parts of neighbourhoods and large grounds have vanished never to appear again. The sun declines in the sky and shines weakly but bravely in a sheen of joyful, patchy yellow, against which a fir is silhouetted in the manner of a palm tree with sleeved arms. The snow lights up and says “Bon courage” to the watcher in retreat from the window or the huddling waiter at the bus stop. As the bus turns past the edge of the mountain the children and adults hurtling down the snow slope upon all manner of contrivances are lost to view, but not long after, from the back of the bus, there comes to view, far above all the unyielding snow, an uncovered steeple of tapering belvederes that shines in a perennial warmth. Outside, it is immensely cold but the air gives to you a vigour in making your lungs distend to their fullest to flow the fluid in your veins. There is no wearying in the open unless the damp grasp of the thriving cold reaches into your lips, cheeks and jaws and freezes them or makes your eyes and nose water more than they should.

Yet there are days even in such a season when the sun is up in a sky where the blue is striking and when, even if the eyes are smarting, you do not relent in your quick strides on a sidewalk across frozen slabs of ice that formerly were an overlap of powdery snow. You are in a silent street and soon you will come within rows of houses with many a beetling brow. The translucent, shapeless slabs at the feet are mottled and they bury in themselves odd twigs from the denuded trees that outmatch the houses in number. Across a space within a gate to the left a bicycle is chained in a terrace, and behind the terrace the silvern azure of the sky appears in apposite contrast with the coaly, extending branches of a tree that almost cover a little chimney. Again, silence dominates the scene. In that silence there is a simple emphasis of the blue and the black that tell you of a dream or sighting you must have had once and thrilled to, so that you cannot really say that you are in a land where you never were before.

On the bare tree of the sidewalk ahead prominent berries cling to the boughs, but these are not fleshy berries though they look rounded and real; they are the stiff loci of new growth when the leaves come back. The tree grows to the height of a long but narrow balcony of fresh wood over the wide, deserted door of the house that comes after the gate. You think home cannot be more embracing in a quiet excitement than this, but there is no flutter, no movement, no sound, no clink, no voice anywhere. An old lady, or rather a lady old in age but active in manner, is coming along in a long black coat that reaches just above her knees; the coat is loosely sashed and, with a gamboge walking stick that she grasps in its middle, she is tapping the snow that has melted and is now freezing in amorphous heaps on the street side of the sidewalk. Under the look of the silent houses whose steps are encroached upon by the spread and whose basement windows are only just free of it, you say “Bonjour” to each other in the conscious closeness of sharing a moment apart from the rest of the world.

Ahead, on the cleared front steps of a house with a path and a yard, a thinking squirrel is hesitating in a pirouette and then standing still with raised forepaws in an assurance that suggests that the house has always belonged to her. Just above the layer of the white shroud in the yard that must warm the ground below with its heavy crush instead of chilling it, a brown stalk peers out and exhibits three fading peonies at its bending end. Other stems thrust out singly and carry axial fluffs that have long since closed on themselves or they bear long, thin leaves that wilt but refuse to drop. You eyes go up to the sloping roof enclosing a pediment over a colonnaded porch, a pediment that imitates a gable upon the lateral, bi-dormered roof of a two-storey house with framed oriels on its sandy ballooned sides. A certain notion keeps turning over in your mind, a notion of how from the depths of a city washed in sun and snow a stimulus can run up to the bulging lobes of the cerebrum to create a lasting impulse to excel or perform in a manner not matched elsewhere. It is an uncommon leavening.

Pages: 1 2 3

One Response to “Writings / Creative Non-Fiction: Prosenjit Dey Chaudhury”

Read below or add a comment...

  1. Amy says:

    A fine account of a Canadian street in winter … very evocative.

Leave A Comment...

*