The whorehouse in a Calcutta street by Jayant Mahapatra

THE WHOREHOUSE IN A CALCUTTA STREET 

Walk right in. It is yours.

Where the house smiles wryly into the lighted street. 

Think of the women

you wished to know and haven't.

 The faces in the posters, the public hoardings

 And who are all there together,

 those who put the house there

 for the startled eye to fall upon,

 where pasts join, and where they part.

 The sacred hollow courtyard 

That harbours the promise of a great conspiracy. 

Yet nothing you do

makes a heresy of that house. 

Are you ashamed to believe you're in this? 

Then think of the secret moonlight of the women

left behind their false chatter,

perhaps their reminding themselves of looked after children and of home:

 the shooting stars in the eager darkness of return.

 Dream children, dark, superfluous;

 you miss them in the house's dark spaces, how can't you?

 Even the women don't wear them

 like jewels or precious stones at the throat; 

the faint feeling deep at a woman's centre 

that brings back the discarded things:

 the little turnings of blood

 at the far edge of the rainbow. 

You fall back against her in the dumb light, trying to learn something more about women

 while she does that she thinks proper to please you,

 the sweet, the little things, the imagined; 

until the statue of the man within

you've believed in throughout the years

comes back to you, a disobeying toy-

 and the walls you wanted to pull down

mirror only of things mortal, and passing by:

like a girl holding on to your wide wilderness,

as though it was real, as though the renewing voice

tore the membrane of your half-woman mind

when, like a door, her words close behind: 

"Hurry, will you? Let me go,"

and her lonely breath thrashed against your kind.

The whorehouse in a Calcutta street by Jayant Mahapatra