The Fuschia Tree
Editor's Note.
This poem, by Tracy Smith, is a poem that I have found myself returning to. Not only does it play with scale--miniaturizing the giant and magnifying the tiny--but it pulls taut with it a fundamental tension that braces our existence. The tension between the cosmic and the earthly. When we spin around ourselves in a field, and the stars seem to be spinning too, why do our arms begin to pull away from our sides? Our local frame is inextricably linked to the rest of the universe.
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By Sahill Poddar, Issue 15, The Light & Dark Issue, November 2012

Also in this issue

  • The Cheese of our Imaginations and The Wheat of our Lives.
    A lot of your work deals with the cosmic, the metaphysical and the larger ideas of religion, truth and death. This same work will, almost eerily, straddle the concrete: in the case of Epilogue, it is rotis, but in the case of say, Public Notice 3, it was numbers, a symbol of man-made measure.
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  • The Binaries of Becoming.
    Every City has its secrets... but Calcutta, whose vocation is excess, has so many that it is more secret than any other. Elsewhere, by workings of paradox, secrets live in the telling: they whisper life into humdrum street corners and dreary alleyways; into rubbish-strewn rears of windowless tenements and the blackened floors of oil bathed workshops. But here in our city where all law
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  • Makeshift.
    Summer evenings of Delhi in the 90’s saw many power cuts. We lived in a Delhi Development Authority colony. The DDA designed these flats for India’s growing middle class. The architecture was uniform, with little heed to aesthetics. The houses were originally painted a sulphuric yellow but over time residents indulged daringly in fifty shades of chalky pink.
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Illusion: Seeing Beyond Seeing
Meaning: In Search of Significance.
Melody: A Different Tune
Rhythm: Ordering Time

Dhrupadi Ghosh is an old friend of mine. We have often had long sessions of adda late at night, discussing her dream projects since her college days at Santiniketan, where she majored in Sculpture.