A memoir usually runs to hundreds of pages. Debarshi Mitra's «Memoir» runs to about a dozen short lines, and that gap is the first clue to what these three pieces are doing. Read together, as they are presented here, "Memoir," "Curse" and "Oblivion" trace a small arc. Someone comes into the mind, a nameless fear settles in at night, and then something dark slips back into the ground. Nothing is explained. The mood is built from windows, streets and bushes.
In "Memoir" the layout carries the meaning. "The wind / blows, // leaves / scatter" is pushed across the page with wide gaps, so the eye has to travel the way the leaves do. The line "in and out" has uneven spaces inside it, so the words themselves seem to drift, just as "You" drifts "in and out of my mind." The "you" is never named or described. We learn only that this person comes and goes. Then the poem turns outward to "the sky / in so many shades / of pink," its most generous image, but the speaker reports it from indoors. The last image is "a crow / pecking at // the unrelenting window." The break after "pecking at" makes us wait, and what arrives is a window, not food or a person. "Unrelenting" is the one heavy word in a plain vocabulary. It turns the crow into a figure for memory: dark, persistent, tapping at a pane that stays shut. A crow is often read as an ill omen, though the poem never says so.
"Curse" moves into darkness. The "pale crescent / hangs in a corner," as if the sky were a room and the moon something pushed out of the way. Then the view drops: "Down on the street below / a bitch moans / in childbirth." This is the bluntest image in the three pieces. The plain word is left unsoftened, and birth is set beside pain in an unlit street where nobody seems to be watching. "My dreams charred" follows, and the past participle makes the damage feel already done, like ash. The ending is the quietest moment: "a recurring fear / of something // I don't know." The stanza break leaves "I don't know" alone on its line, so the admission feels exposed. The title is never explained, but one reading is that the fear itself is the curse, since a dread with no object cannot be argued with or fought.
"Oblivion" is a single sentence broken into two-line stanzas, as if the poem were holding its breath. "The night thickens" makes darkness something like fog or liquid. "Not a footstep / to be heard" removes every human sound. Then "the snake / slithers back // to the undergrowth," and the hissing s-sounds and the line break before "to the undergrowth" make the retreat slow. The snake is not killed, only hidden, and the word "back" suggests it has been here before and will return. That echoes "recurring" in the previous piece. Judging by the imagery, forgetting here is not a cure but a hiding place, where the fear waits underground.
Across the three pieces the setting keeps falling. We start with a sky and a window, move to a crescent and a street "below," and end with a bush and its undergrowth. Light thins as the pieces go on, from shades of pink to a starless night to a night too thick to see through. The mind seems to sink from the surface, where a person can be noticed, to the depths, where a fear can only be sensed.
The poems rhyme nowhere and keep no regular meter. Their pace comes from short lines, white space and enjambment, so that silence does as much as the words. That is also why they are worth studying. Mitra rarely names a feeling directly. The one plain statement, "I don't know," admits that the feeling cannot be named. Everything else is a crow, a dog, a snake or a window. The reader is left to decide what those things stand for, and the poems seem to trust that a reader can feel the weight of an unnamed memory or fear without having it explained.