CategoryCreative Writing Issue 2 Issues Poetry Sections Vol. I

Foster Child

January 15, 2010 Off By Debanjan Bhattacharya

Hopping across the brooks running down the Patkai

Pestering Bhaiti reaping his paddy,

Running aimlessly chasing the dragonflies.

The mist on the tea-leaves

Bhaiti’s bamboo shoot rice,

The pretty niece

Well include the first kiss!

My weird accent ,

Taunts at school

They were just plain ignorant..

I was no immigrant.

The cold eyes of Bhaiti,the gun slung across,

Freedom,Liberation,Revolution

Surely its not me they want to oust?

The ouster,the heartache,

The last of the quiet woods

Nightmares,grinning faces,schadenfreude..

A decade of wandering

The cities,the bruises,the closed half-cabin.

The loner nursing his whisky

And the pangs of nostalgia seep in.

A need for belonging and homecoming!

The only place I could call home

To one day go back to a peaceful Ahom.

But the taunts,the cold eyes,

Foster Child

You never were one of her own!

We welcome your comments at letters@friedeye.com

About the author

A Bengali who spent his childhood in upper Assam, Debanjan Bhattacharya is an MNC software engineer currently based in Pune. Having spent his early adult life in Chattisgarh, Kolkata and Bangalore, Debanjan infuses his writings with the sense of alienation that children of the Northeast face when they find themselves a misfit in any region due to language, diction, racial and ethnic features. This poem records his one-sided love affair with his birthplace- a place he belonged to and yet never fitted in. He writes out of the personal experience of “not belonging to every other place” lived in thereafter. “Infact even Kolkata seemed alien.”

2 Comments

  • Rakib says:
    January 17, 2010 at 9:37 pm

    This is good one… loved it… I have spent my live in different different places… b4 I could get to understand the life out there… I had to move to a different place… it was not my choice but was a necessary action with the time…

  • Mr. Pramathesh Borkotoky says:
    January 15, 2010 at 4:21 pm

    I quite identify with your emotions. Very difficult to adjust in a place where you did not spend your childhood.

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