Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri - The Cow That Lives By the Gita

Chaudhuri LE P&W Vol 6 Nov-Dec 2025

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Six
November- December 2025

The Cow That Lives By the Gita, poems by Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri.

What the Star Meant

after Rilke

If only the world would hush –

this raucous turning of wheels,

shouting neon, sirens chewing the dark,

the endless cough of the city’s breath.

Then, perhaps, I could hear

what that star – yes, that one –

tries each night to murmur

through its patient trembling.

It leans close, I know it,

daring the veil of smoke and sorrow

to part for a moment,

to let its silver syllables fall through.

But the noise here is thick with forgetting.

Even silence is crowded,

and the skies are smudged

like old parchment too often rewritten.

Still it persists,

a single vowel of light,

spoken again and again

into the unlistening void.

I want to become so still

I might once more be sky.

And in that sky, the star,

at last, would speak.

The Cow That Lives By the Gita

There she sits,
a slab of calm
in the molten fever of the noon,
the sun hangs like a question
and she,
with flies haloing her flanks,
offers no answer.

Rickshaws groan, brakes squeal,
horns bleat like goats in existential crisis,
and yet her eyes,
half-lidded, ancient,
gaze somewhere beyond eternity.

A pack of dogs erupts
snarling, teeth on the cusp of narrative,
they lunge, bark, circle.
She does not flinch.
The dogs retreat, confused
by such impenetrable indifference.

Traffic divides like a river meeting stone.
A man on a scooter curses,
a child waves,
someone takes a photograph,
the world
moves around her.

Not of it.
Not against it.
A creature neither rushing towards nor away.

The Gita spoke of this,
to remain
as untouched by praise
as by the sting of insult.
To feel neither the fever of arrival
nor the chill of loss.

She lives that ancient text
wearing the wisdom of the uncluttered.

Not apathy,
but a stillness earned through
a million monsoons of becoming.

Be like her,
says the wind that parts for her.
Be the unmoved in the moving world.
Sit in the centre of the road,
and let life
learn how to pass,
even as you learn how
to let life pass by.

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is either an ‘accidental’ editor who strayed into publishing from a career in finance and accounts or an ‘accidental’ finance person who found his calling in publishing. In 2017, he was named Editor of the Year by the apex publishing body, Publishing Next. He has edited leading authors in India, and books he has worked on have won a number of National and other awards. As an editor at HarperCollins and Penguin Random House, he has published and edited some of India’s leading poets like Gulzar, Joy Goswami, the collected works of Keki Daruwala and Dom Moraes, Ranjit Hoskote, Amy Singh and others. He is also the author of a book of poems, Whims, published by Prof. P. Lal’s Writers Workshop. His poems have been published in The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English in 2023 and 2024. He writes on music, films and books for a number of platforms and on his website https://shantanuraychaudhuri.com/.

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri – The Cow That Lives By the Gita

What the Star Meant

The Cow That Lives By the Gita

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