Lofty - to fill up a cultural chasm

by Anuradha Bhattacharyya

A cat answers a poignant call, leaps over the boundary, comes up the stairs and rummages through the library and the racks and hides in the bag. Hung on the wall like a spider, a muddled mind not dead, sometimes hungry, at times a wooden flower and not knowing the real from the ideal, the loner envies the lover of his games. He paints the world in new hues, adds music to many songs and sets the loner’s groaning heart right. He uses his hypnotic charm to restore youth to a stifled life. He has come like rain where the sun rules. He is lofty above the crowd and he gingerly lifts a retired bird on his wind. As love flows sometimes in fairy tales of emotions, you wish you could offer more caresses to a flower but indeed, you take flight in poetic expressions.
Nothing surpasses passion except compassion. If someone tugs at your sleeve and suggests a whirlwind romance what will you do? If you give in to passion, your conscience pricks; if you do not give in, the whole world pricks. I have tried to give expression to a cultural chasm that becomes apparent to one at middle age and only after the best things offered to one have disappeared due to a lag.
When with time life begins to show signs of crumbling, you groan in pain. I have captured the sound of those groans in numerous images. It becomes more hysterical when something emerges from the unknown zones of your heart and tries to conquer time, restrain decay and forces you to push hard against accepted cultural ties. It requires a lofty ideal to deal ideally with a cultural hole. In the following poems one can read the heart’s dilemma at such an interruption. If read in the given sequence, the poems form a storyline.
If Lofty touches you passionately, it would mean that you have not been swallowed up by the chasm.

86 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2015

About the author

Dr. Anuradha Bhattacharyya is the author of Light Inspired. She has won the Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi Award for Best Book in English for the novel One Word in 2016 and again for Still She Cried in 2019. She is a widely published poet and fiction writer with 5 novels and 5 books of poetry to her credit. Dr. Bhattacharyya has been conferred the Commendation Award on Republic Day of India, 2019 by the Chandigarh Administration for her contribution in the field of Art & Culture. She is recipient of the Award of Honour, Sahitya Shree by Kafla Intercontinental, 2016. She has won the Poiesis Award of Excellence in Literature for her short story Painting Black and Blue in 2018.
Dr. Bhattacharyya is Associate Professor of English at PG Govt. College, Sector-11, Chandigarh.
The Lacanian Author and her poetry books are available as PDF in academia.edu. She can be heard on YouTube as a Guest Speaker in the Haridwar Literature Festival, 2018.