Geet Chaturvedi is a contemporary Hindi novelist, poet, essayist, and translator. His fictional works display an inherent music, as well as inflections from sharp, rhythmic sentences, making them almost poetic. “To Become a Street,” a short prose translation, is poetry in movement, or moving poetry, describing the protagonist’s thoughts on walking the streets of Mumbai: to reach a destination, one cannot avoid journeys, their hardships and fractured flows. Chaturvedi, who has a distinctively fragmented style of writing in Hindi, comments: “I have a brokenness inside me, an incoherence. This incoherence has received different shades from world literature, which when I read in my language feels like piano music played on a flute.” Chaturvedi’s work is at once contemporary and traditional, steeped in his own culture and in world literature, but distinctively of its own “now.” – Anita Gopalan
To Become a Street
In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
– Ben Okri (The Famished Road)
I used to walk on this street. The surroundings changed, but the street never did. All rivers drop into the ocean one day, but where the street goes and drops off, no one has seen. She would say: if all the world’s streets were gathered together, they would make a nice bun of hair.
Every street walked from its place to tie at her nape.
Then I would run my hand through her hair and exclaim: “Look, how many streets are caught in my fingers!”
I did not walk by way of fingers. Though the hand ends after the fingers, its presence lingers beyond. Likewise, the street even while it turned at a corner still maintained its “impression of being” straight ahead.
From Nehru Chowk to Flowers Lane. I have paced this street more than any other by now. And I do not even live on Nehru Chowk, nor have I ever had any reason to go to Flowers Lane. And in the world that walks between the two, I can view every color of the larger world. In this way, I fancy, my walking is meshed inside the world’s walking.
Looking at the streets caught in my fingers, she would say: “I can see a long journey written on your hand.” I wished to tell her (though could never bring myself to), it is our hands that bear the imprint of the longest journey, life. Instead I told her breezily that in my idleness I wandered so long every evening, the streets themselves came and tacked on to my fingers.
I look at my fingers, the cigarette stuck in them. I will not light it right away. Like an old man, I will dodder along the street and later, seated on a slab of rock in front of Central Hospital, I will gaze a long time at the cigarette before asking a passerby for a match, and after being refused two, three times, a fourth fellow will pass me a match and then I will light it. Like a long take in a black-and-white film.
And this entire sequence will stretch out in such slow motion that I will begin to see myself as a street. A street that walks, but so sluggishly that it appears stationary. When a river becomes a street, it first loses its current. Then its waters. Then it loses itself. Just as the people who walked the pages of my life have been lost.
To become a street is the biggest cruelty that can befall a river.