Raja
Chakraborty’s 65 Ways to Talk and Forget
Reviewed
by
Dr.
Oindrila Bhattacharya
Assistant
Professor,
Department
of English & Literary Studies,
Brainware
University, Kolkata, West Bengal.
65 Ways to Talk and Forget | Poetry | Raja Chakraborty
Penprints, 2025, pp.
86, INR 399
ISBN: 978-819847194-9
65 Ways to Talk and Forget by Raja Chakraborty, published by “Penprints”
in 2025, is a collection of intrapersonal poems offering a humane, modestly
ambitious exploration of how we speak to the past and how we let go. The
collection is presented to us as a compact, quietly ambitious collection that
treats forgetting not as failure or some ailment, but as a method, a
deliberate, dignified art. As the reader comes across the opening poem,
“Waterfall”, he soon comprehends as to how Chakraborty establishes the
collection’s chief temperament, as intimate rather than confessional,
elliptical rather than programmatic. The poems often make the readers feel like
eavesdroppers, as if the conversations are overheard at dusk, and they become
witnesses to fragments of speech, sudden images, a lingering nostalgia. There
is a recurring tonal hush, mesmerizing the readers while keeping them curious
throughout. The title itself prepares the readers to expect a catalogue of
modes, not a single narrative. Whether the “ways” in the title are literal techniques
of speech or metaphors for the small enactments by which an individual
disentangles himself from memory, the poems perpetually test that border.
Chakraborty focuses carefully and meticulously on ordinary details and lets
them accumulate associative meaning.
Formally, the book masters the art of brevity
and line-driven movement. Many pieces are short, aphoristic gestures, others
expand into longer lyric sequences that fold back on themselves. The diction
throughout is quite captivating and highlights the poet’s championship, the
language avoids grandiloquence, preferring instead tactile nouns and verbs that
ground the poems in the body and city. Images recur and they are arranged to
perform emotional work rather than to dazzle. Poems like “My Grandfather”, or
“Biriyani” touch the heart of the readers, bringing tears to their eyes with
the reminder or realization as to how “grandfather’s old umbrella/ Takes us in
when it rains and more” (Chakraborty 9) or the fact “That was Baba, like rose
water/ And kesar, flavouring our lives/ Just to the right bit” (Chakraborty
15). Chakraborty again reminds us, as we are running after money and chasing
dreams, that “Love is not a list of items/ You own/ It is not to be chased/…
Close your eyes/ And feel the hand of love” (Chakraborty 18). The poems present
sweetness in the opening lines, but then, the endings leave a bitter-sweet
feel, as in “Of Love and Eclairs”, which begins as: “Love is/ A lot like
eclairs” (Chakraborty 21), and ends as “You never know/ When a tongue will
forget/ The taste of sugar” (Chakraborty 21). Chakraborty trusts relationships,
emotions, accumulation and suggestion rather than rhetorical display.
The collection’s urban sensibility is worth
noting. Chakraborty often situates his poems in streets and apartments, in the
incidental architecture of city life. This setting supplies both images and
social texture: public noise, the press of strangers, the domestic interior as
a repository of memory. The urban scenes are not schematic, they are felt spaces
where memory and routine intersect. When the poet attends to relationships,
lovers, friends, parents, his attention is understated but loyal. He seldom
indulges in sweeping generalization about love or grief, instead, he presents
the small, specific moments in which attachment is experienced and, sometimes,
relinquished.
Thematically, the poems orbit around loss,
memory, speech, and the small acts of forgetting that enable survival. It can
be not merely humans in the process, it can be “A lone computer/ In the census
department” (Chakraborty 31) with its “oblivious screen/ Buzzing with flies”
(Chakraborty 31) as “One more name was added/ To the list of the forgotten”
(Chakraborty 31). Chakraborty’s poems act as the text posing as the “Conscious”
bringing out all and everything that is often desperately repressed into the
realm of the “Unconscious”. “Talking” in this book is not always talk-ing in
the social sense, it is a mode of addressing the self and the past, an
intrapersonal communication. Some poems enact literal dialogue, fragments of
conversation that reveal misapprehension or tenderness, while others
reconstruct interior monologue, where speech becomes a means of negotiation
with absence. “Forget” is not eradication here but reordering. Sometimes it is
the selective erasure that prioritizes what allows one to wake the next
morning. Forgetting, here, is not cowardice but a deliberate, necessary
reconfiguration of attention.
Chakraborty’s collection has many poems relying
on internal repetition, slight syntactic variation, and enjambment creating a
musicality that rarely calls attention to itself, instead, it makes the poems
easy to inhabit. At their best, the lines achieve a surprising intimacy, a
single human detail is treated with the care of an heirloom. There are poems
crying for attention to the fact as to how cruel humans can be as they “forget”
what mercy is, as for instance, the poem “18 Hours in Hell And More” proves to
be a testimony to cruelties inflicted on an individual continuously for eighteen
hours: “Tied to the post he pleaded mercy… Sticks, rods, bicycle chains, bare
fist/ He even tasted brick in his mouth” (Chakraborty 36). Such inhumane
tortures need to be somehow “forgotten” by the human civilization, isn’t it so?
Mention must be made that never for once has
Chakraborty allowed his collection to be monochromatic, there are lyric
fragments, prose-adjacent pieces, direct addresses, and narrative snapshots.
This variation makes the collection an interesting read.
In terms of craft, Chakraborty displays
commendable control. Line breaks are attentive, the diction is often exact, and
the book’s pacing, the alternation of short and slightly longer pieces, is
judicious. Chakraborty’s adventurous side can hardly be overlooked, as several
poems of the collection experiment with syntax and voice in ways that pay off
by momentarily unsettling conventional reading and inviting new attention to
the poem’s mechanics. Such experiments show that the poet is interested in the
medium of speech itself, not simply in autobiographical content.
The quieter moments accumulate an emotional
geometry that feels coherent by the book’s close. The poem, “Pestonjee” gives
an ache at the core of the heart with a remarkable nostalgia inviting the
readers to go back to the almost but not really “forgotten” memories of
schooldays holding the hands of Pestonjee of Koregaon bylane. The poem “Exodus”
screams out the harsh reality, that all “Eros” will be ultimately repressed
into the space of the macrocosmic “Unconscious” by the inevitable “Thanatos” of
“Time”: “They were leaving/ As bricks fall away from old walls… They all leave
in the end/ Memories too” (Chakraborty 82).
Readers who appreciate contemporary Indian
English poetry will certainly make the collection interesting, with a voice
that is local (in terms of its attention to place and detail) yet cosmopolitan
(in terms of its formal references and lyric temperament). It will never be an
overstatement to state that 65 Ways to Talk and Forget reads as a
consolidation of craft and sensibility, its virtues being restraint, attentive
imagery, and tonal subtlety, making the book a rewarding read.
Works Cited
Baral, K.C. Sigmund Freud: A Study of His Theory of Art and Literature. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Ltd, 1995.
Chakraborty, Raja. 65 Ways to Talk and Forget. Kolkata: Penprints, 2025.