English Literature

Hunger  It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back. The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly, trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his words sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself. I saw his white bone thrash his eyes. I followed him across the sprawling sands, my mind thumping in the flesh's sling. Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in. Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the froth his old nets had only dragged up from the seas. In the flickering dark his lean-to opened like a wound. The wind was I, and the days and nights before. Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shack an oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls. Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind. I heard him say: My daughter, she's just turned fifteen... Feel her. I'll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine. The sky fell on me, and a father's exhausted wile. Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber. She opened he

 A Missing Person In the darkened room a woman cannot find her reflection in the mirror waiting as usual at the edge of sleep In her hands she holds the oil lamp whose drunken yellow flames know where her lonely body hides Jayanta 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 t