“The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street” also depicts the theme of prostitution. It is precise, realistic and highly communicative. The poem begins with the instruction to the protagonist how to find a whorehouse in a Calcutta Street and ends with the prostitute asking him to leave her because she is a hurry to receive new customers. Lust yields place to commerce and the message is quite clear. K.A. Paniker observes: “In “Hunger “the protagonist is also the speaker; in the other two, he does not speak in the first person; he is presented by the poet. The woman is passive, not an active sharer in the guilt; she takes to it mechanically, tired and bored, without even professional grace. She is marked by insensitivity in. “Hunger”, unless we interpret the other hunger referred to as positive response as her part, and by brazen matter of factness in “The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street” and “Man of His Nights”. She is a passionless tool. The portrait of woman as a whore sounds realistic in Mahapatra, but he has also written poems in which he idealizes woman as in “The Indian Way.”
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| Mahapatra's Poem, The Whorehouse in A Calcutta Street, Critical Analysis |
In the first stanza the speaker invites a customer into a whorehouse. He assures him to think himself to be the owner of the place. The whorehouse seems to be wryly smiling because a new customer has arrived. The speaker asks the customer to think of all the women whom he wished to know but could not. The customer had seen many beautiful faces of women making sexually exciting gestures in the advertisements of various goods in posters and public hoardings. They are so depicted to arouse men's sexual desire and thus, to promote the sale of goods. Mahapatra exposes in a tone of mordant irony the efforts of commercial and industrial houses to portray women as sex objects just for promoting the sale of various goods:
“Think of the women
you wished to know and haven't
The faces in the posters, the public hoardings
And who are all there together,
those who put the house there,
for the startled eye so fall upon,
where pasts join, and where they part.”
The whorehouse is a place where the customer may hope so see some faces resembling those which he had seen in the posters and for whom he had burning desire.
The whorehouse is a centre of great conspiracy for customers who are induced to come here for sexual gratification, which is devoid of the feelings of love and tenderness. It is a mere mechanical pursuit without any space for human consideration. A whorehouse is a place of infamy, of sexual exploitation. Even if a customer, whose conscience awakes, refuses to have sexual act with a whore, it is considered a glaring contradiction. The customer wants to learn something about the secret of inner life of prostitutes. Their joyless chatter hides their unfulfilled desire for home, husband and children. Mahapatra realistically describes the tragic lives of prostitutes:
“Then think of the secret moonlight of women
left behind, their false chatter,
Perhaps their reminding themselves
of looked - after children and of home
the shooting stars in the darkness of return.”
The hope of having children is a distant dream for them: “Dream children, dark, superfluous.” They experience unbearable pain in the depth of their hearts:
“the faint feeling deep at a woman's centre
that brings back the discarded things
the little turnings of blood
at the far edge of the rainbow.”
The customer moves into a room with dim light and perfect silence. He cherishes the desire to know about the nature and psychology of women but the prostitute who enters the room has no consideration for his feelings. She mechanically does what her profession demands from her. She employs all tricks of the trade to gratify the customer sexually:
“you fall back against her in the dumb light,
trying to learn something more about women
While she does what she thinks proper to please you,
the sweet, the little things , the imagined.”
The prostitute's professional attitude reveals to the customer his own inner being. He feels that had always been opposed to this kind of sexual gratification and that he had also felt the ardent desire “to pull down” the whorehouses, the dungeons of corruption, humiliation and flesh trade. He is shocked when the whore harshly asks him to go away soon because the work has been done and she has to go immediately in order to entertain a new customer:
“ ........ as though the renewing voice
tore the membrance of your half - woken mind
When, like a door, her words close behind:
“Hurry, will you? Let me go”
and her lonely breath thrashed against
your kind.”
The uniqueness of the poem consists not as much in the artistic components inherent in it as in the fact that the protagonist “trying to learn something more about women” gets deprived of his normal sexual response, perhaps due to the rough and crude attitude of the whore. This realistic aspect of male sensuality and the brazen attitude of whores has never been depicted in Indian English poetry. The credit of expressing it goes to Mahapatra.