Calcutta, Crow and other fragments

Here are some broken lines, soaked and fermented in a city. Call them what you will-a scrapheap of reverie, monologue, dialogue, remnant, remainder. They nip at the mythic crow of Calcutta: its ancient mariner, the chronicler of its many lives. These ‘fragments’ are markers of time past and present, in a city that the writer touches and watches incessantly. She leaves it always to come back; its tales turn, but do not die. Close ones die, intimacies die and are reborn, homes die and are resurrected, or are found again elsewhere for a moment-or a lifetime. The crow, and the word, leave traces of this corporeal, fabular city on a hot and humid sky-ravaged, insouciantly tender, resilient. Calcutta, Crow and other fragments is Brinda Bose’s debut chapbook. Bose grew up in Calcutta. She studied literature at Presidency College in the city, and then at Oxford and Boston universities. She currently teaches at the Centre for English Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She has written on literature and cinema, gender/sexualities, modernisms and the humanities; she reads a lot of poetry and would call this intrepid exercise its very distant, disinherited cousin.