Book of the Week: at my doorstep by Tapan Mozumdar

A cockroach trapped in a bathroom, a child drawing a half moon, an old couple walking together, a forgotten temple, a pandemic vaccination queue. Tapan Mozumdar’s at my doorstep begins with the everyday and then nudges it slightly out of place. The result is a collection of haibun that records the strange texture of life during the pandemic without allowing the pandemic to become the only story.

First published in 2021 by Yavanika Press in Bengaluru, at my doorstep grew out of an extraordinary period of enforced isolation. Mozumdar began writing haiku after attending a workshop with Kala Ramesh in 2020, discovered haibun through Shobhana Kumar’s work, and then challenged himself to write a haibun every day during NaPoWriMo in April 2021. The photographs by Tom Clausen became another source of inspiration for the collection.

Mozumdar, based in Bengaluru, is an electrical engineer and construction project management specialist who came to creative writing later in life. His stories have appeared in Indian and international journals, and his work has been featured at literature festivals. His entry into haikai during the pandemic led to publications in Contemporary Haibun Online, Under the Bashō and Sonic Boom.

The opening haibun, “Sisyphus,” turns a mundane bathroom encounter into something almost mythological. The cockroach repeatedly slips down the porcelain basin while the narrator tries, unsuccessfully, to rescue it. The haiku that follows is wonderfully unexpected:

world map
redrawing boundaries
on the bathroom floor

p. 2

The bathroom becomes a miniature geopolitical landscape. After the lengthy comic episode with the cockroach, the haiku suddenly enlarges the scene. The poem also prepares us for one of the collection’s recurring concerns: how our private spaces became strangely connected to the enormous anxieties of the outside world.

In “Before the Curfew,” an apparently insignificant encounter with a child on a scooter becomes a meditation on fleeting connection:

changing season…
looking for kigo
I get an allergy

p. 4

The joke is particularly appealing to anyone who has tried to write haiku. The poet is searching for the appropriate seasonal reference while his body provides a much less poetic response. It is also a wonderfully self-aware moment in a collection that repeatedly places the writer inside his own observations.

“Vaccinated” captures the strange mixture of hope, anxiety and performance that surrounded vaccination during the pandemic:

waning moon…
tube lights don’t flicker
inside the hospital

p. 5

The waning moon outside and the artificial light inside create two very different kinds of time. The hospital is brightly lit, controlled and technologically reassuring, while the moon continues its natural cycle.

One of the most touching pieces is “Child’s Play,” where an apparently ordinary family lunch reveals an uncomfortable distance between generations:

urban jungle…
recording birds to learn
who’s who

p. 8

The phrase “urban jungle” works on two levels. The speaker is surrounded by family but seems almost as unfamiliar with them as he is with the birds whose calls he is trying to identify. The haiku becomes a small, poignant comment on how technology can connect us while leaving intimate relationships strangely unexplored.

Near the end, “Marginal” turns its attention towards social structures and exclusion:

unreserved coach—
the moon from here
just the same

p. 28

After the prose’s meditation on rules, rulers and margins, the moon offers a different kind of equality. From inside or outside the privileged space, it remains the same moon. The simplicity of the image gives the preceding argument room to resonate.

One of the pleasures of at my doorstep is the way Mozumdar allows the prose and haiku to complicate each other. The prose gives us the social world, its anxieties, absurdities and relationships. The haiku then steps aside and lets one image carry what the prose cannot.

As you read, try covering the haiku at the end of each haibun and ask yourself what image or thought you expect the prose to lead towards. Then reveal the haiku. Did it complete the story, change it, or take you somewhere entirely unexpected?

You can read the complete collection in the THF Digital Library. The THF Digital Library can now also be easily found through the carousel on the home page, making it simpler to discover the books, journals, and other treasures in the archive.

Do you have a full- or chapbook-length book published in 2021 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Book of the Week selections are made by THF Digital Librarian Vidya Premkumar and are featured with permission.