Bloomsday Centenary Poem
In Free Verse and Prose
Kaiser Huq
16 June 2004---
Imagine!
A hundred years
since Stephen
Dedalus and Leopold
(Poldy) Bloom stepped out
of their respective homes
in Dublin...fair city
where girls are so pretty...
Imagine the day
in another city (town rather)
with the same initial---
Dhaka.
Let
two of its denizens,
separated
like the Hibernian anti-heroes
by age and religious heritage
enact the Odyssean perambulations
through fetid, waterlogged lanes,
clutching dripping umbrellas--
the monsoon having arrived
with a bang---
and tiptoeing through slush.
their names...one must have
a mythic ring...
how about Ali Baba Sindbad,
and the other, stolidly resonant...
Babu Hurree Chunder Mookherjee,
that extraordinary creation
of the master of Anglo-Indian fusion,
Ruddy Yaar Kiplingan.
As for correspondence between chapters, why, 'Circe' is of course set in the old red light district of Kandu Patti; 'Scylla and Charybdis' in the Northbrook Hall Library: the subject of the impassioned debate that takes place there isn't about Shakespeare's supposed cuckoldry, as in the Dublin version, but something equally exciting, whether 'tis nobler to pursue Vaishnavite devotion, with the help of one's own spouse or someone else's. For the rest, let undergrads toil on it as a tutorial assignment, meticulously plotting Joyce's Dublin on to our tropical metropolis. Suddenly
I am struck
By a double-barrelled epiphany:
Dublin is Dhaka is any city
And Bloomsday is today is any day...
Henceforth,
The map of Dublin as in Ulysses Suffices for all cities,
And calendars are redundant
For everyday in Bloomsday... Hurree Babu (for you are perennial citizen of these sultry parts), kindlynote: here's a suitable topic for yet another of your submissions to Notes & Queries, to be only rejected, like the others to the Royal Society, and eventually to be included in a privately printed limited edition of a definitive collection of all your unpublished adumbrations. Dhaka, Bloomsday, 2004 Kaiser Huq teaches English at Dhaka University.
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Illustration by Hasan Immam |
