Debasish Lahiri has nine collections of poetry to his credit, the latest being A Certain Penance of Light (2025). Lahiri is the recipient of the Prix-du Merite, Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2019.
Ketone
The still-life of “A Sky through Leaves” painted by stone is a moving one. – Better this than a sky cast in stone in a still room where electricity, clueless, buzzes between electrodes – door-knob to window sill, without the courage to open either window or door – like a fly trapped in the contemplation of its own flight: a Cretan maze inside an insect brain that desires death as a respite. – Imagine painting a still life, three apples on a table, arranged in a bulbous red triangle, like a fossil’s imagination of the past or a cue-ball taking a break with fellow performing balls on a pool table – imagine the surprise at the sedate survey, the hover beside the dark table-top as scrutiny of apple skin grows desperate and granular. – That is hunger in a still room! – This hunger feeds on the fat of slender hours before dawn – watches apples shed their pulp till rind and pip take you back to a garden, where every night, a shadow took off its flesh, every night, to lie down in its bones. – The body eats to stay hungry – a wavering memorial to hunger between door-knob and window sill.
Monotone
Music is a monotone, like silence. Music is the tone of silence heard through the warm air pricked with cries of cicada at evening, like a beast that is going into the undergrowth, seeking darkness with luminous eyes blind to the thorns and brambles of sound. – Samuel Barber climbs the winding staircase, from navel to adam’s apple – an adagio strings together bones loosened by man’s sorrow. – Beware that instrument of silence, the swollen adam’s apple! – A cello’s woe grows wider than a hippopotamus’s arse and now escapes the room – clean. Too much music leaves the room in stunned silence. – Beyond the mosquitoes of dusk and their pallbearing tunes for deceased sunlight – beyond the gnats by the pond and the frogs, auditioning for the serenade to the stars just as the rains come down – beyond the tired wasps on the mantelpiece is a room where Barbirolli insinuates the playing of a violin to his thrilled audience – Elgar erupts, but the room survives. – There is often too much music in silent rooms. Try turning on the lamps in that room and Wagner will still sound like nothingness. Is that why the silent is imagined dark too, always?