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[REVIEW] “River of Time: Maitreyee B. Chowdhury’s I Walk Instead” by Mani Rao

Maitreyee B. Chowdhury. I Walk Instead, Red River Press, 2026.

Maitreyee B Chowdhury’s fifth book I Walk Instead is a collection of poems inspired by her visits to places across India, on foot.

The startling, jazzy poems in this book draw upon the land, its rivers and the life beside them, and upon the witnessing presence of people (and birds, and flowers, and trees, and scents, and colours) to tell several stories both poignant and delightful.

The title I Walk Instead is a frame tale, like the Arabian Nights, open-ended, drawing the reader into one story after another and opening up the imagination. “Instead of” what? Chowdhury explains that she walks away, “away from others, from circumstances or from places”, and towards people, for “it was people I was coming back to.” Between the away and to, she “meets the new”, “the stillness of the roads”, and sees “the unexpected”.

The structure of the book is a poem in itself. Candid black-and-white photographs of crowded streets, a spare railway platform, gushing rivers witnessed by boulders, and wall paintings: these are all visually articulate. The design of the book is in the inimitable style of Dibyajoti Sarma of Red River Press; even the font calls for applause: not only the publisher’s logo and the poems, but the section titles too, are set in the IM Fell DW Pica font. Stack the section titles, and we find a poem:

Through a Disobedient River
We Come Off in the Seams
Every Dog has a Village Code
I Did What Any Poet Would Do
Wait for That Luminous Pop

The poems in this book are gritty and potent, imbued with histories laden with tension. As Chowdhury says of the River Dihing:

a shape-shifting water, garrulous and political—
terrifying whispers pass through it,
and stories that must never be told.

Yet we are told as many stories as there are poems in the book.

In “The Sound of Scars” (p. 32), “the poor remain poor, water remains water”, and “history sits lonely by the chhatris in Orcha”.

In “Ajay the Parrot Seller” (p. 33), the very first line, “[i]t is 2020”, recalls the Covid pandemic, when migrant workers in India’s cities had to walk hundreds of miles to return to their homes. Ajay is walking to “a mythical land without disease”. Walking here becomes an act of storytelling and of exchanging narratives about one another’s circumstances: “I walked with Ajay till the end from where his home started, and mine ended.”

“In the Shadow of the Casuarina” (p. 85) speaks of the sea, which is “a conman”, for it does not behave like a sea. Chowdhury may be referring to the backwaters, where “everywhere” there are “rotting fish, its smell, history and carcass, / like someone you murdered, and forgot in your backyard”. “The anger of a thousand flies” follows the poet. How does one respond? With vomit. And with poetry.

Then I did what any poet would do,
wrote on love, and puked some more. (p.85)

In “Narmada Ji” (p. 21), the poem hints at how history assumes different forms for visitors and villagers alike. We catch a glimpse of future dams and villages destined for submergence.

But what is Chowdhury saying through this documentation of a landscape troubled by time and space? There is only the still eye that takes it all in. The poet is like the meditating birds in her poems, standing on one foot while, with the other, she grasps a poem from the scene.

A long stare,
reflection and calmness later,
the bird sits on one leg.
On the other
the delectable ability to steal a fish
off a basket, just about to be empty.

—from “A Bird on the Betwa” (p. 95)

Could that last phrase, “just about to be empty”, have been deleted? It is, however, crucial here, for it places us in that moment, just before the fish is caught, just before the basket is empty. We become aware of the moment’s potentiality, and the poem acquires an immediate, present quality.

Consider the poem “Jolpai” (p. 18), which, according to the internet, refers to the Indian olive. Chowdhury writes about a night spent in Dawki, a border town. The political border has been drawn between two neighbours whose windows face one another and a tree standing between them. We never discover on which side of the border, or on whose land, the tree’s roots and trunk lie. Yet roots travel, as do branches, fruit and, above all, scent. Both neighbours gather the fruit from their balconies, and both experience its scent. Thus they are united by nature, and perhaps by rain as well, although hope itself remains fraught.

Between your window and mine
is a jolpai tree,
that divides your fruit and mine
into countries, once one.

Time had proved our politics stronger,
proof, that often
night falls
before the rains make love.

We now encounter the song of separation and longing in what Chowdhury calls “Raag Biraha” (for biraha means the pain of separation), which is written in the tradition of Bhatiali, the soulful folk music of Bengal. This music of Partition unfolds between sunrise (“bhor” in Bangla) and sunset, and one does not know how to journey from the beginning of the day to its close:

when we sang Raag Biraha
to bhor in Bhatiali,
without a Thumri guiding you to sunset.

Perhaps the title of this essay might equally well be “Cry in Two Languages”, the last line of “Inexplicable Water” (p. 20). Bangla words and expressions fill this book without the aid of an intrusive glossary. These poems hold their heads high, as good poems do, never stooping to explain themselves.

“Kalboishaki” (p. 75) is an excellent example of how Bangla space is embodied in this book. The poem opens with Kali, and at first the scene resembles an image from a festival. Then, suddenly, Kali comes alive: “while I watch the mother tying her wild wet hair”. Who is this mother? Perhaps someone on the street. And is she the same as the Mother of the next stanza? Perhaps. “I brood on the uselessness of letters to the Mother.” Meanwhile, flowers fall and stain the ground, they “bleed” (p. 75).

While the details in these poems arise from, and belong to, the places that inspired them, they become powerful poems because Chowdhury imbues their moments with drama.

In “Death of Desire” (p. 36), she describes a body on a pyre at the burning ghats of Manikarnika. Suddenly, a hand slips out of the fire, “as if trying to hang on to dear life”, only to be unceremoniously thrown back into the flames.

The poem “On the Road to Panchmarhi” (p. 98) opens by describing the shape of cotton, but almost immediately the cotton comes alive, dreaming and even rebelling.

Fields full of cotton—
Round, shapeless, ether-like,
white little dreamers, bandaged in parts.
I stand watching them them run away from farmhands,
free from pod, white butterflies

The next image is that of clouds, but it is “a sack full of cumulus clouds”, and the poem deliberately leaves it ambiguous whether these are clouds that call for our attention because they resemble cotton, or sacks full of cotton that so closely resemble clouds that they become clouds. The narrator is part of the story, watching these dreaming cottons, while the clouds are “always slightly out of reach”. It is an entirely dynamic and dramatic moment.

The poem “Three Naked Men” (p. 72) describes a scene in which three men, behind the staircase of a railway station, are using heroin. When one of them looks back, it is the poet who is laid bare:

One of them looked at, and through me—
I stood naked,

And what of it? Now we come to the absolutely delectable part. Chowdhury describes her own self-conscious reaction.

The world erupted into a thousand fireflies
as I squeezed my eyes
and rinsed my tongue

The poem ends by evoking the story of the emperor’s new clothes, and the pretence of being cultured.

The poem “Witchcraft Nights in Mawlynnong” (p. 90) is as sensuous as the very name of the place. The entire poem lingers over the “night’s velvet touch” upon the eyes, a night that is “relying on wonder”, and meanders through an utterly delicious description of light falling upon mushrooms. Then, all of a sudden, the poem ends with a dramatic sting, overturning the magical vision to reveal another side:

a desperate mating call to death—
a valley on the prowl.

Oh, the rivers that flow through this book: Betwa, Brahmaputra, Narmada, Yamuna, Ganga. The river is also the poet. Dihing is “Shape-Shifting Water” (p. 17), but in “August on a Train” the poet tells us, “I shape shift” (p. 51). From “I watch my youth go by” (p. 20) to “It is the midnight of my fiftieth year” (“The Sound of Scars”, p. 32), the book sweeps across the poet’s own chronology. In this latter poem, haunted by the “white bones” of the River Betwa, the poet walks “by an unknown river,/across old battlefields”. The river of time joins the geographies of the poet’s childhood and adulthood (p. 17), and while there is an “ephemeral cloudiness about memories”, the poems rescue the scenes that continue to haunt.

Water is itself a recurring theme, often associated with lovemaking. In “Jolpai”, “night falls, before the rains make love”; and in “Water on Water”, we encounter the stillness and the forgotten romance of Roopmati and Baz Bahadur in Mandu.

If words were to fall into water,
sprout stories
and bear fruit—
land, water, air
would break into song here,
and through this absurdity of water on water,
shyly make love at night. (p. 29)

Some of the poems in this book have previously appeared in journals, and the collection seems to have been written over several years. A previous collection of poetry, Benaras: Where Even the Present Is Ancient (2013), is likewise rooted in place, while a work of non-fiction documents the history of the anti-establishment Bengali poets of the 1960s known as the Hungryalists. Chowdhury thus emerges as a chronicler, writing a richly textured history of places and spaces.

Having read this slim yet densely layered book, I was left with the impression that Maitreyee B. Chowdhury has given everything of herself to it, holding nothing back.

^{How to cite: Rao, Mani. “River of Time: Maitreyee B. Chowdhury’s I Walk Instead.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 3 Aug. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/08/03/i-walk-instead.}

Mani Rao is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including So That You Know (HarperCollins, 2025), as well as acclaimed translations of the Bhagavad Gita, Saundarya Lahari, and the works of Kalidasa. Her groundbreaking study, Living Mantra: Mantra, Deities and Visionary Experience Today (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), explores mantra as a lived spiritual experience, while her forthcoming works engage deeply with the Upanishads. A former resident of the International Writing Program at Iowa, OMI Ledig House, and the International Poetry Studies Institute (Canberra), she has performed at major literary festivals, including the Jaipur Literature Festival, Hindu Lit for Life, and the Melbourne Writers Festival. Her poetry and essays have been widely published and anthologised, reflecting a distinctive blend of lyrical intensity, spiritual inquiry, and intellectual depth. Further information about her publications is available at www.manirao.com.