Editorial

Of New Years and Love-letters! Down Memory Lane…

Bengali New Year, Pohela Baishakh, Poyla Baishakh, there are numerous ways in which we celebrate the colours in our love letters, the letters that are part of a festooned gallery of imagination! What the world wrote, what we could visualize down the memory lane, across the stale ashpits of a fine yet forlorn city, rummaging through serrated umbrellas of time, jostling with mindboggling innuendos that provided us tarpaulin, tattered hats, hamburger and rancid mornings! Love letters were in plenty, ones that were left out for the old beggarwoman’s littany on the North Kolkata street, one for the pious priest with snakeskin arms, one for the well-toned bodybuilder’s belly filled with gluttony and pain! Some love letters down the supine lane floated as miniscule dreams- coffees, potboilers, cinema-halls, hurricanes and earthen water bottles stacked along the dusty roadways of Kumartuli. Some clicked their tongues in dismay, others clicked their shutters in disgust! Oho! Letters in the afternoon? Letters for the housewife with braided hair and vermillioned forehead. New Years exude a smell of their own, forsaken letters, collage of broken mirrors strewn across College Street, insomniac trams with mutilated hooters, tea-stall owners looking aghast and cosmopolitan shopaholics breathing through charred retina of time!

This Bengali New Year, we present yet another palette of fresh colours in our ‘Sunday Talks’ segment. A cover feature by mother-daughter duo, talking about winter and woollens, gastronomic delights and food in poetry. We have Sunday Reflections in myriad forms of poetry, highlighting love, separation, nature, human relationships. In the Sunday Translation section, we have a Bengali poem translated into English, and we also have a Bengali poem as part of the Poetry in other Languages section. This Sunday, we also have a prose piece that finds out the beauty in adda.

You can also send us your entries for ‘Sunday Talks’. Stories, poems, travelogues, paintings. Mail us at

techtouchtalk@gmail.com
sreesup@gmail.com

Happy Sunday. Enjoy!

Sreetanwi Chakraborty