Rajorshi Patranabis’ latest collection of poems Gossips Of Our Surrogate Story, published by Hawakal in 2025 is a fulsome tribute to his Wiccan proclivity and its “pagan pulses” (32) through an allegorical yoking of the personal and the mythical. The work is a richly layered allegory involving Osiris, the lord of darkness and his beloved Isis, the moon goddess. The juxtaposition of two eternally oppositional abstractions – light and darkness – sets the tone for the singular union of opposites that the poems ritualistically posit. The speaker celebrates his tumultuous relationship with his beloved through the surrogate story of Osiris, god of the underworld and the afterlife, and Isis, his beautiful wife or conversely, the ‘grande passion’ of the Egyptian myth through its human parallel on earth.
Elements of Indian mythology embellish the original Egyptian story with suggestions of another culture providing scope for contrast and comparison. On one occasion the speaker cries, “Behula is not my Isis. She stays with him forever. I remain away from my Isis” (11), drawing parallels with the Behula-Lakhindar story in the Manasamangala canon of Assamese, Angika and Bengali medieval myth. On another occasion he claims, “Darkness has painted me blue” (18), strengthening his identification with the dark-skinned Krishna, eighth avatar of Vishnu and deity of love, compassion and protection in the Hindu pantheon. Isis becomes Radha to the speaker’s Krishna, expanding the ambit of references through which the mutual passion between the lovers may be allegorically amplified.
Gossips Of Our Surrogate Story is extravagant fable, sensuous serenade and resounding rhapsody that rewrites the rules of love in flamboyant fetishes of feeling, often in kinaesthetic imagery that transgresses the rigid borders of the senses in flagrant fusions of fervour to give rise to what he calls “canonical apostasy” (48). If truth is an “incomprehensible mirage” (74) in this collection, love is “that same old wretched harmony” (49).
Through his use of an idea that is akin to Lacanian “jouissance” Patranabis engages in an exuberant exploration of love in its multifaceted dimensions. Lacan reasons there is “a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle” which is linked not to greater pleasure but to trauma, pain and the death drive. Some of the verses in the present collection recall the pleasure-pain of Lacan’s theory in their affinity to “jouissance”. The lines “I gift you my dark verses of an uncontrolled rhapsody” (77); “My blood blooms in her roses. She flows in my flooded veins, resurrected in red” (46) and “She is a torrential algorithm of newer definitions of liberty” (26) are Lacanian in this respect.
Repeated and frustrated searches for truth in the poems convince the speaker that the latter may be located, not in a logical culmination of an idea or relationship but in the materiality of its startling opposite. Not unreasonably therefore, provocative paradoxes, ingenious chiasmuses and contrasting constructions riddle the discourse with witty reversals. “We drown to breathe” (103) and “We unite in estrangements” (121) are two particularly pithy examples of such clever inversion aimed at profound philosophical disclosures. An act described by the speaker as “inhaling you, exhaling me” demonstrates a mastery over contrapuntal imagery that exploits the stylistic devices and dividends of grammatical and lexical reversal.
The mood of contrasts permeates the collection with interesting surprises at every twist and turn of the overall utterance, engendering a poetics of parody that is intellectually teasing even as it is emotionally stimulating. The line “From my dark world, I wait for a sunrise inside your eyes” (95), for instance, is a romantic reworking of opposites involving self and beloved; darkness and light; and night and dawn. “When the earth sleeps, I wake up to be in your dreams “ (111) is another instance of the harnessing of literal and symbolic associations of opposing positions. “My destitution is the glory of a rich pauper” (16) again depends for its effect on a terse opposition of ideas presented through simultaneous contrast and comparison. “I want to be your life, you trust my death” (76) is yet again a verbal play on contrasting ideas and distinctly Dickinsonian in its enigmatic orientation.
At times, a peculiar perplexity attends the internal argument of the paradox which goes a step further, beyond the mere balancing of contrasts. “She stays with me and I stay with her. We stay away” (15), reminiscent of the puzzling irony in the poetry of the 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, may mean that the lovers are apart in their togetherness, or conversely, together in their apartness, both conditions being equally psychologically tenable. Such equalizing propositions, present in many of Dickinson’s poems and especially true of her ironical love poem “I Cannot Live With You” imbue Patranabis’s verse with a sense of fine discrimination and an elliptical effect that are cerebrally rewarding.
Witty paradoxes are further problematized through their linkage with emotional states of being. “I loved you more when you deserted me” (50), in its overturning of expectation is a line that is reminiscent of Pablo Neruda’s famous love poem “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines”. Neruda’s complex emotion in his rhetorical reasoning, “What does it matter that my love could not keep her” echoes through the annals of time and poetry as Patranabis’ Isis “carries every broken piece with her through timeless portals” (21)”.
The line “ It was me once, it’s you now, it will be us hence” (91) conflates the temporal with the ontological, identifying the self with the past, the beloved with the present and their combined entity with the future. The intimate imbrication of the human subject with time is a continuing preoccupation in the book, subsuming within the self journeys in time and space, delineating at times, stages in one’s evolution. “I am back to where I belong” (79) suggests an arc of experience travelled by the speaker before he is returned to the point where he best belongs.
Elegantly produced and carefully edited, the book is a handsome compendium of prose poems. It is, at the same time, a blur of images, a rush of energy, a riot of colours, a burst of music and an effusion of emotion marrying Wiccan notions of feminine power and beauty with the mesmerizing magic of Isis, extraordinary wife and goddess.