Plato In A Metro

Born in 1998, Sinchan Chatterjee graduated with English Honours from St Xavier’s College, Kolkata, and is now pursuing his Master’s in English at Jadavpur University. He loves writing short stories, prose poems, poetic prose, and has started writing for the stage. His debut collection of short stories, In Search of a Story, was published in 2018 and reviewed in a few journals. Sinchan’s stories have also been printed in The Statesman. A number of school and college magazines like The Xaverian, Ode to Expressions, Srijan have also published his poems and prose works.

Teaser

Lullabies

You used to sit by my bedside
And gently run your hand over my forehead
To smooth out all the invisible wrinkles of the day
And make up new stories every night to lull me to sleep.

I strained my ears and my eyes to keep them awake,
To listen to your story weave itself.
I ended up failing each time, succumbing to slumber,
Apologizing the next morning for not having heard your story to the end.

Tonight my eyes and my ears promise complete attention.
I am wide awake. Begin your story: I will hear it till the last word.

As I lie sleepless tonight,
Twenty years away from lullaby-induced sleep
That sent me off to faraway dreamlands,
I wonder if you believed in the dreams
You gently nudged me into.
I wonder, when I fell asleep,
Did you finish whispering
The rest of the lullaby
To yourself?