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;...