Downpour Kolkata University
Teaching at Kolkata University with Bhatri Mukerjee, a paying gig.
University conveniently situated next to Coffee House on College
Street where Ginsberg first met Sunil. So Subodh, Ram and I stop in
for hadj -- wind up creaking memories stair to giant room, walls
browned by coffee smoke, bored waiters, hubbub of intellectual
conversation ebbing and flowering and bouncing. The eternal now of
the Kolkota coffee house scene. Outside we are surrounded by
hundreds of bookstalls, so jammed that books must arrive by
rickshaws – no trucks can penetrate. Proprietors sit on stall,
cross-legged, stall sevenfeet wide, thousands of books stuffed in
all available space, make that no available space. Old, flaking,
falling apart gorgeous University, with stained and faded photos of
great professors of the past stretching from forgotten to oblivion,
all the way to the ceiling. The students have all read Bahtri’s
Jasmine – and she is a wonder, weaving together her Kolkata past and
present, her romance in Iowa and the resultant ongoing happy, mixed
marriage, her originating what is an now an entire genre, “immigrant
fiction.” Students listen closely, well-behaved, smart, like a
polite private high school in the States. Beatriz shoots, Ram too,
and national TV is on hand. I’m on next, students get into
modulation to performance, hiphop. Pay for teaching is $25 for two
hours. Lunch is boxed tuna and pasty with cardboard cake. Then it
starts to rain, as much inside as out, the old buildings barely
standing up to the deluge, just let it pour through.
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DOWNPOUR KOLKATA UNIVERSITY
Halls hold scholars’ centuries
Photos yellow dust darkened walls
Swinging doors to the Dean’s Office
Pouring down wet precious liquid
Burble glurg pl’flow write
Outta the pipes—hold it! It is now
Increasingly rising over your feet wear
Sandals—lucky. Hoist your dress, graduate
Student in Aboriginal Behavior!
The shadows plummet! Total flood overflow
Rinses university. Boat drives by, open door
To taxi? water pours in!
Water drips from every department:
History, Literature,
Science, Mathematics.
Antiphonal raindrops,
Galleons subaqueous
Drowning in Wisdom