Dr Santosh reviews Syllables of Broken Silence, by Braja K Sarkar, exclusively for Different Truths. 

This fifty-page book is a sparkling gem, exemplifying the dictum that all good things come in small packages. Penned by Braja K.Sorkar, a bi-lingual poet, author, translator, and critic, who also edits Tristoop, a prestigious literary journal in Bengali, the book, Syllables of Broken Silence, has also been aesthetically published by Tristoop Books. Some exquisite drawings by Abhik Sarkar, [Ph.D.], the poet’s son, and assistant Professor at Alliance University, Bangalore, embellish the book, adding to its sparkle. 

  
The book cover reproduces a Wassily Kandinsky painting – an artist, with emphasis on geometric abstraction, which I have a deep admiration for. One of the reproductions of his iconic painting, The Blue Rider, adorns the wall in my study, so this book caught my attention immediately.  Most of Kandinsky’s paintings represent a Fractured Reality, and this is what I could glimpse in Sorkar’s poems, where he plays with memory chunks and fond reminiscences that suddenly erupt from under the patina of time. The reality of a long-lost lover, who keeps knocking at his consciousness, hammering at his heart, in fractured and broken pieces of remembrance-missing, yearning, and a mind-numbingly severe longing. 

The book is, ‘In Memory of Kamla Das, the icon of Indian English poetry,‘ whom Sorkar deeply admires. 

Three blurbs on the back page by three renowned scholars speak highly of what the twenty-seven poems in this book have to offer, in terms of imagery, tender yearnings, dormant desires, memories, unsung songs, and the impassioned intensity of the anguished whispers of a soul wounded in love. 

Gopikrishnan Kottoor, the eminent poet and author, says that in the poems of Sorkar, one finds that ‘the passion is genuine, the words are heartfelt.’  
Boudhayan Mukherjee, another eminent poet and author, says, “Braja K. Sorkar’s poetry has occupied that space between the ‘broken’ and whole with brilliant equipoise.”

Rudra Kinshuk, another eminent critic and poet, praises his poetry for its apt images and thematic variety. He says, “The act of reading Sorkars’s poetry is always a journey in which a reader is more a fellow traveller than a merely passive onlooker.”

 In the title poem, Syllables of Broken Silence, he says,
‘I hear the words you have never spoken,
Songs you never sung, and
The echo of my soul passing through
My veins in unknown symphony…” P 13 

  
Ever since the lady caught the poet’s fascination, he seems to have become indifferent to all songs and sounds, finding his wounded soul buried in the womb of the night, making us see the contours of broken dreams, hear the silence vibrating with ominous sounds, and find words taking different shapes, as the past dances in his blood. Brimming with overwhelming pathos, the reader keeps going back to this poem, because of its lingering impact.

In another poem, Never Mind, p 15, we find the fire of that lost love still burning bright:
“Ever since I have nestled in your heart,
you make me burn alive.
 Even if you are a season,
I never mind,
Dear love…” 

In Beware Of, P 43, he calls love ‘highly inflammable’ and also an infectious, and incurable disease. 

In Life is like that, (P 22),  he says, 

“Darkness burns: 

All of a sudden

There is laughter of rain…

Silently

We move to the shore again! ”

The pulsating nostalgia of those lost memories still echoes relentlessly; he tries to wipe them away from his mindscape but in vain.  The fact is that the poet still hears his lost love singing songs of homecoming, the melancholy echoing in his heart, persistently.
‘I have developed a bad habit of
loving you, fishing you in shallow water
And tenderly getting rid of you…’ [Fishing, p 38] 

So immersed is he in her, that we find him willingly transporting himself to an obscure land of his own making, his imagination going into overdrive, as he sees her amidst
‘flashing rivers, hills and
Waterfalls, beneath which you took
Your bath at a hot noon! 

You used to clean your sleek face at
Dusk, sitting beside the blue-eyed cat,
Your most favoured. Sometimes you walked
Alone around the old-fashioned cottage, built
A century ago by your great grandfather.” [Pretending, p 44] 

In all his poems, we find him creeping into his memories, oscillating to and fro between the past and present, the much-loved face of his beloved, flashing upon his memory, in recurrent bursts of light.

In ‘The Sustenance,‘ P 33, he calls himself a blind traveller, dragging himself through thorny bushes, which slowly morphs into “a radiant horseman running steadily and 

Off and on breaks 

The sound of the plunging hoofs…” 

Somehow, here I was reminded of The Blue Rider, a Kandinsky painting depicting a blue-cloaked horseman, galloping through a meadow, astride a white horse, in the backdrop of the wilderness. 

Caught between the past and the present, the real and the imaginary, he holds you by your hand, taking you along his journey, making you listen to rain songs, as you slowly become privy to his bleeding wounds, to the ripples of the yellow river flowing inside him, and before you know it, you are ‘Back to the Roots. ‘  

As you close the book, you realise that his mornings will continue to begin with the thrumming of the lady’s memories [the day breaks with your memories; Leaves of Memories, P. 20], while the reader will continue to hear the clippity clop of the galloping horse… 

This is a book highly recommended for every poetry lover, and the drawings so beautifully dotting the book, make it every poet-artist’s cherished delight.

Cover image sourced by the reviewer.

Santosh Bakaya

Reuel International Awardee [Poetry,2014], Setu Award for ‘stellar contribution to world literature’ [2018], Eunice Dsouza Award, 2023, [WE Literary Community], Santosh Bakaya, Ph.D., poet, essayist, novelist, biographer, TEDx speaker, has written twenty-three books across different genres, Ballad of Bapu, and Only in Darkness can you see the Stars [Biography of Martin Luther King Jr]. have won international acclaim. “What is the Meter of the Dictionary?" is her latest solo book of poetry.

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