Introduction of the Poem:
This poem shows the dilemma of a person who is invited to visit a brothel. While he wants to find out how a prostitute behaves or how the mind of a prostitute works, the woman immediately gets down to “business” to please him as a “passionless tool” so that she can sexually gratify him and move on to the next customer. He tries to plumb the depths the woman's soul and her inner longings, but for her it is pure business and does not touch her private self. The failure of communication, says C.L.L. Jayaprada, is not exclusive to the experience with a whore. The condition of the modern man is itself solitary and alienated. According to K.A. Paniker, The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street shows both the strength and weaknesses of Mahapatra as a poet. The first and the last stanzas in the poem have the same quality of tightness, sharpness and precision as Hunger possesses. But the middle sections are lax, verbose and over - literal.
Critical Summary:
The speaker invites a potential client into a brothel, telling him that he should consider himself owner of the place. For a moment the customer would think that the house is smiling, as if it is amused at the entrance of another customer. The speaker asks him to imagine all those alluring women whose faces he has seen in various advertisements in print or on the hoardings, whom he wanted to have but could never have and would never be able to have. The whorehouse is the place where a customer may expect to see some faces similar to those he has seen on the posters and which he had longed for.
The customer is somewhat ashamed of visiting the whorehouse. The courtyard of the place seems to be a partner in the conspiracy that is a routine in all such places of ill - repute, with the customer being its target: It fails when a customer goes away without choosing a prostitute for his sexual gratification; it succeeds if the customer chooses a woman, pays for her and leaves after having sex with her. If the customer feels ashamed of having come here, he should think of the women he has left behind, women who are childless and are longing to have children; they merely satisfy their longings by imagining that they have children.
While moving back a little in the dim light of a room in the whorehouse, the customer collides against a whore who has just stepped into the room to be surveyed by him; he selects her. He has not come here only to satisfy his sexual desire but also to learn a little more about the psychology of a woman, how a prostitute behaves and how her mind works. For this, he wants to talk to her, watch her and observe her. But she straightaway gets down to her professional duties that she routinely performs to please a customer. She starts fondling him mechanically, employing all the techniques that she knows so that the customer is pleased and visits her again.
The whore's initiatives in having sex with the customer reveal to him his own inner being. He cannot command his inner being because there is a conflict between the conscious and the sub - conscious working of his mind. He has always been opposed to this sort of instant sexual gratification. Sometimes he has a strong urge to dismantle these houses of prostitution. He is shocked when the whore harshly asks him, “Hurry, will you? Let me go.” Her words seem to “thrash” the man because he has been expecting some kind of an emotional response from her while she (a professional whore) wants to finish the business in hand and get away from him as quickly as possible to wait for the next customer and the next payment.
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