When a celebrated poet settles down to writing a novel, there is an inevitable sense of anticipation, and in the case of the multi-faceted Sudeep Sen the crossover appears to be seamless. Known for his imagery and the visual quality of writing, Erotext, his newest work, continues to provide a veritable feast for the senses. Containing an assortment of prose-poems, meditative musings and razor sharp observations on life, the book traverses multiple dimensions. Divided into five sections—desire, disease, delusion, dream and downpour—the author’s love for alliteration continues all through the book (lyrics, lust, latex; cantos, cantilevers, cadavers; apyretic, apyrous and aqua-cool, etc.).
Thus, we have the ‘Disease’ section where Sen pares down the human anatomy to blood, bones and tissues while hot fever and night sweats play out in the cold sterile spaces of a hospital. The neon colours on the monitors in contrast to the starched white sheets and gleam of syringes lend a chilling feel to the text. Death stalks constantly, a stealthy omnipresent entity even as the author strains to rupture the time-space fabric and reach out to other worlds and other horizons. In direct contrast comes the soft-as-thistledown ‘Desire’ section where there is love, lust and separation, the erotic and the spiritual as well as old-fashioned romance and feminine mystique described with exquisite lyricism. “My tongue is parched in spite of your lavender saliva, saliva which has changed from that bouquet to the taste of heather, wild weather-ravaged heather,” writes Sen. The writing is touched with kaleidoscopic colour and yet, paradoxically, the colour white recurs constantly (‘The big white bird is witness to this, so are the white candles on stage, the sheer white chiffon on the two women, the white parchment, the white ink and the white of the white light’). In some pieces, Sen links desire with food and its preparation, Indian desserts in particular. Tagore is a palpable presence as the author draws frequent inspiration from his finest verses and lyrics.
The need to transcend the mundane minutiae of everyday life, a first shot at painting on a canvas, a kite swooping down on a white moth, a search for Cezanne’s bones and other deliciously esoteric matters make up the ‘Delusions’ section. Moving from Krusevo to Ghent and from Shanghai to Connecticut, ‘Museum Pieces’ is an exquisite work that holds in its brevity a rare blend of visual and tactile magic. The ‘Dreams’ section travels down labyrinthine caves, castles and dungeons, capturing the dreaming silences of these places. The book ends on a bombastic note with ‘Downpour’ showcasing rain in all its glory. There is the languor of hot muggy days, the surrealistic feel of watching tropical rains from the confines of an air-conditioned room, the desolation of dismantled ships catching the rain in a deserted shipyard and the sheer exuberance of the monsoons arriving. The East Bengal-West Bengal fault lines shiver entrancingly as Sen explores the quality of rain in both places.
There is a niggling feeling of déja vu due to a lot of the pieces having appeared in earlier books, but synthesised beautifully, the old and the new combine and faithfully chart the author’s stream of consciousness over the years. It would be difficult to pigeon-hole this book falling as it does in the no-man’s land between prose and poetry. An overload of quotes could distract the reader from the actual text which has enough spine to stand on its own, actually. The book title is a bit of a misnomer, the erotic content being an ethereal, fleeting and gentle thing. Weaving his words around sounds, fragrances, colours, the quality of light, dreams, desire, cities scattered around the globe and the physics, chemistry and biology of human existence, Erotext makes for a thought -provoking read.