Description
In Maximum Love in Patel Nagar, bilingual poet Paulami Sengupta explores a new city as a woman, and finds herself in other cities and other public spaces, as she navigates the dynamics between the private and the public, and the joys and the travails of living in a metropolis, which is not your home — an insightful search for meaning in the mundane.
Sensitive to the softest hues, sounds, and flavours of life, Paulami’s poetry is subtle, suggestive, and witty in the metaphysical sense of the term. With tongue in cheek, she can respond to the ironies of life and without getting edgy, she can make us see not only what Virgil calls ‘tears in the heart of things’ but also tender moments of deep communion with nature which make even the loneliest of us feel ‘picnicesque’ and float ‘happy and saline’ with plastic bags hobbling ashore. I was first drawn to her ‘Patel Nagar’ series, which superbly delineates how different a woman’s sense of alienation in a borrowed space is from a man’s sense of alienation, which Baudelaire made much of. Even in a new locality, the migrant girl gets immediately connected to the different kinds of smells rising from local dhabas, different kinds of subdued sounds, and prickly whispers from the neighbourhood, and also to the subaltern on the footpath, and birds in the veranda washed with phenyl. It is interesting to observe how, bit and bit, they become a part of her own being: ‘their home, twigs, feathers, and deaths/ are my deaths, feathers, twigs, and home.’ This is what we mean when we say that so grounded women are and so great in building bonds that even in their poetry the sense of time is beautifully filtered through the sense of place. – Anamika
Paulami Sengupta is a publishing professional based in Kolkata. Her poems (in English and Bengali) and translations have been published in Kabi Sammelan, Nether, Cold Noon, The Sunflower Literary Collective, and Indian Literature. Her recent collection of poems in Bengali, under her pen name Anjashi, is titled Bayosandhir Haraf (Boibhashik, 2021).