Field Notes on Kindness

349.00

Author: Ankush Banerjee
Published Date: 23/09/2025
ISBN: 978-93-48111-72-2
Paperback: Paperback
Pages: 112
Category:

Description

This collection of poems brings out visceral memories. — AJ Thomas

Ankush Banerjee takes inspiration from memories, anecdotes and characters in the family, but recasts them with an eye for detail and an attitude of pure wonder.  — Mani Rao

In [Banerjee’s] hands, time is non-linear, plunging into the present, future and past at once and gradually, taking the reader into line after delicious line of discoveries across geographies, mental landscapes and sensorial experiences. — Shobhana Kumar

A study in resonance, restraint and reimagination, this collection marks an essential addition to contemporary Indian poetry in English.  — Pervin Saket

Ankush Banerjee is a Kochi-based poet, educator, book reviewer, and research scholar in masculinity studies. His work appears in numerous print and online platforms. This is his second book of poems.

From the Book

ANNUNCIATION

to swings that swing & the merry-go round,
the teeter-totter & the house made of clouds.

to the yellow slide rising
& sensory panels studded with bee’s buttock

& horse’s head.

to spring-riders, spinners & still rings,
& an aquarium with angelfish & guppies,

rasbora, catfish. to a sandpit with small shovels
& Bob’s truck parked behind monkey bars.

I leave you be,
& after an hour when I return,

you would have grown a little. Your nanny
would report, you cried a little, then busied

yourself with crayons, colouring book,
your Tiffin of strawberries

stencilled from stars.

PREPARING FOR ANOTHER LIFE

Before the anaesthesia kicks in,
for the last time — you are Long Distance Runner
no longer in Pre-Op
staring that dome of light —
to you a moon you want to touch
only because flying to it won’t need legs.

The body like a train’s whistle
the darkness of a tunnel
coiling around it. An attendant
joking about the birthmark they will cut
to place the screws in the socket.
The birthmark looks like a sparrow
about to fly. Before anaesthesia shatters
the bough of your body, before the
moon overhead is a mouth of darkness, you
pray they fill the space between dislocated hip
& future with what you heard but
could never hold
in that joke about a grackle
taking flight.

VARIATIONS ON LOVE

We would never be who we were —
the full-blooded dolce vita of a blind date,
quoting Jeanette Winterson from
memory laced with the musk, prayer and frankincense
of lonely afternoons. We usually ate alone.

Beer-drunk, we muse on Prufrock’s last lines
by the sea of the most expansive blue.
We feel younger than we are.

‘I am stronger than you think’, we murmur,
almost simultaneously, cautiously, knowing —
Time makes clumsy fools of us.

Later, after we make love at daybreak, and the sky
is a watermelon cut upside down over our heads,
and we mockingly provide assurances of an everafter —

there is peculiar tenderness, the way
you hook your
bra.

Your hair a charcoal sketch
over thin, pale shoulders.

I want to unhook it again,
though, this time —

not out of desire! Stay.

VARIATIONS ON DEATH

They sing in a different language. Their accompaniments
are tolling bell, monotony and faith. They leave a
trail of mogra & marigold in their wake. They cross a
neighbourhood where women exchange recipes from balconies
and cabbages explode in earthen pots.

I walk with the procession, lead by the scent of sandalwood
incense in the air. An awkward curvature of limb
sprouting a few dead hairs, glimpsed
in contours of wet marigolds
heralds the strangest paean of
mortality mingling
with panic.

They continue to walk
into the South Indian sunset, carrying a makeshift
bier that would have served as a trolley
bearing dead fish or fruits.

A mangy dog chews a few marigold
petals off the road,
spitting them, in disappointment.