A Doe Eyed Bengali Beauty Poem by Rm. Shanmugam Chettiar

Sonali Dasgupta then
And Sonali Rossellini now
Passed away this week all alone,
At the age of eighty four in Rome.

It was in nineteen fifty seven.
A scandal broke of an affair
Between Sonali,27
And Roberto Rossellini,57.

The occurrence was in Bombay.
Blitz and Film India flashed the news.
To elope with Roberto Rossellini.

They flew to Paris and then Rome.
She took her second son, one year,
Leaving the other with her husband,
Harisadhan Dasgupta, a filmmaker.

A doe eyed Bengal beauty was she.
An aspirant of an actress was she.
She led a humdrum existence,
Playing a second fiddle to her spouse.

Her husband deputed her to assist
Roberto Rossellini, a celebrate
Film maker of Italy, in script writing
In his documentary of India.

Discomfited and yet flattened
By the attention Rossellini lavished,
She,5'8", succumbed to his charm
And slipped into her arm and then bed.

She had to desert her family
And elope with no other way left
As she had conceived illicitly.
She gave birth to a female child.

All the fifty years while she lived in Rome,
She dressed in saris and looked Indian.
She lived with elegance and grace.
Her estranged husband has later died.

Her second son died and daughter fled,
Having converted to Islam.
Her first husband died in penury.
She died alone, aloof; who knows how?
09.06.2014