One among the many odd things I have done is walking at 2 AM through the corridors of a hotel undergoing renovations, in search of water. A friend and I had booked this place online for the duration of a conference and when we reached, we found they had just completed rebuilding…the protective covering from some sections had not even come off. But they honoured their part of the bargain and let us stay there. All was good till at about eleven at night, when I thoughtlessly finished off all the drinking water. Later, finding my friend extremely thirsty, I rang up Housekeeping and Reception by turns…to no avail. So, feeling evangelical, I stepped out of the room in search of water and walked into utter and total darkness. I walked to the other end of the passage, peered down and found the reception a gaping black void. That’s when it struck me that we were the only people in this hotel- all the staff had gone home. There was no guard either. As I walked back to the room, the doorway looked like a block of light in a chunk of darkness. It was a most beautifully desolate sight. Back in the room, I remembered a bag of oranges we had bought earlier. Nothing like freshly squeezed orange juice to assuage guilt and take care of a cranky, thirsty friend.
The real reason we made the trip in the first place was not the quest for academic excellence, but rather, to visit the final resting place of a young man very dear to my friend. His untimely demise had shaken her and this trip was a search for the much-needed closure. We travelled a long, long way, on roads hewn out of mountains, the chocolate brown of the earth covering every conceivable surface. Summer was at its height and I was careful not to drink more than a mouthful of water at a time.
We reached the cemetery. There were rows of graves, marked and unmarked. There was no way to find him except ask for help at the office of the nearby church. The office was a relief, with its cool tiled floors and a ceiling fan. The priest called the father of the young man and asked him, “There are two women here to pay their respects. What is the number of your son’s grave?” The poor man couldn’t remember. And I wondered how one forgets the number of the grave of one’s only son. The priest hung up and looked sheepishly at us. “Maybe we just look at all these graves and say a general hello?” I tentatively asked my friend. She remained silent. The priest sensing her grief, sent for his assistant and they combed through a huge register and located the number. Upon reaching that simple, unmarked grave, we stood in a pool silence. Us and a raven that we imagined was the soul of the departed.
The priest and assistant came to see us off. It was quite the occasion in those parts- two mysterious women visiting the grave of a young man. I think the last event to cause this sort of flutter in the village was the coming of electricity. I mentioned this to my friend on ourlong way back to the hotel and she burst into laughter. Maybe that is what is called closure. I did not mind the dust anymore.
Personal commitments and the vagaries of lockdown keeping us geographically apart, the next time I saw her was in yet another cemetery. We were the only two people there. The burial had not happened. The prayers were still going on at church. The cemetery had no graves. Only vaults sealed with concrete, with iron rods drawn across them. In some cases, two rods crisscrossed the vault. I caught sight of my friend walking towards me. The first thing I asked her on seeing her in person after a year was, “Why the rods? Do they imagine the dead might push open the vaults and leave?” Such is the nature of sorrow that no reply was needed or given. It was almost afternoon and we stood in pouring rain, staring into the depths of a newly opened vault, the edges jagged and raw. The darkness within made me think of the hotel corridor and that single column of light. Two very different types of darkness and two very different experiences of light. Perhaps, two very different vaults.
The search for the somewhere else is what takes us across continents, oceans and chasms. I wonder if that search ends. Or in most cases, if it even begins. We are too rooted, too afraid, too busy preparing for some inevitability that these journeys remain unembarked upon. Our stories for never setting out are almost often the same, only the characters change. The philosophy of the quest demands the sacrifice of excuses. The charm of the excuse is so great that we lose the courage to leap. I once spent ten minutes staring into the depths of a swimming pool, unable to dive in, despite there being no danger of drowning. It was the inability to take the plunge. A stranger at the pool finally put me out of my misery and pushed me in as she casually walked by.
Kiran Bhat’s poetry, like the poet himself, is not afraid of diving in at the deep end. It is fearless and speaks loud and clear. Written from various parts of the world that Kiran has made his home in, the verses reveal the poetics of a bright and beautiful mind. Having begun travelling at the age of twenty, he has been to 132 countries, learnt twelve languages, and has called nineteen corners of the world home (Atlanta, New York, Mysore, Bangalore, Madrid, Lisbon, Cuzco, Florianopolis, Delhi, Malindi, Istanbul, Tokyo, Yogyakarta, Shanghai, Moscow, Paris, Mumbai, Cairo, and Melbourne). But his heart resides in Mumbai. He speaks English, Kannada, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Turkish, Indonesian, Hindi, Japanese, French, Russian, and Arabic to various levels of proficiency.He generates very energetic conversations with creative people across the globe and his crucial participation in online events such as Golchakkar keeps the discourse flowing.
The strength of his poetry comes from the interrogations that he subjects himself and the world around him to. What interested me was that the questions he asks are the ones we may ask ourselves in the course of a day. But the answers are very different from the ones we are wont to give. Kiran answers with no subterfuge. The responses hold nothing back- just like the poet himself. this can only come from a person who is at peace with himself and in control of his identity. The incidental nature that one ascribes to identity is shattered with the conscious, lucid way that Bhat addresses his own.
The whole process of standing up and walking away from the world you have set up in a space of a few years or months and entering a new culture, handling a new currency, a new history and political custom is not an easy task. The self becomes a disciple of the mind in the process. The body- a mere vehicle- not the core of our existence as we often consider it to be. Little wonder that one of Bhat’s signature works is Kiran Speaks, a series of conversations that he has with his consciousness. Modeled on the styleof Confucius’ teachings, these poetic interrogations take on different voices. To quote the poet, “I believe mostly in the strange serendipity that comes with the chaos of our world.”
The effervescence of Kiran Bhat’s personality shines through in his narration. This why I have preferred to let him speak through the videos. This is also the first time that Mandarin is being featured on Samyukta Poetry. To convey the sense of peace that these poems bring about and because in these chaotic times, a little bit of art that navigates and replicates the pathways of the mind seems appropriate, we feature doodle art by Kukku Xavier. I think they go well together- the questions asked and answered with the openness of skies, smells of cities once called home, thirst quenched with orange juice, lost loves, slivers of light at the end of corridors and the shadows cast by death. All meet in art. All is art.
It has been a while since we brought you an edition of poetry. A lot has been happening in the interim. All over the world. A second wave of the pandemic is sweeping through, regimes are in for a change in America, Britain is still rummaging around seeking an equitable answer for its dilemma. Meanwhile, we have learnt that there is “too much democracy” in India. I have heard of too much food, too much money, too much power, too much evil…but too much democracy is a new one. And rather problematic too. How much is too much? Much has been made of this muchness.
And it was also during this time that there were storms gathering on the southern and northern parts of the country. Too much of a coincidence? While Cyclone Burevi ravaged parts of South India, uprooting trees, electric poles and homes, up north, farmers were gathering in huge numbers to protest against oppressive farm laws. To stop the government from uprooting their livelihoods. To use up a bit of their bountiful democracy. They have come and camped. Women, children and men. In tractors, trailers and other assorted vehicles. With enough food to lay siege to the capital and with more food on the way. They grow it after all.
A few years ago, I read about the havoc caused in the lives of potato farmers who had signed contracts with PepsiCo to supply potatoes for chips. The intricacies of corporate stipulations put paid to the financial securities of a lot of farmers. To ask a farmer to grow potatoes of a certain size is probably the plot of an absurdist play. No one can dictate how much vegetables ought to grow. Least of all potatoes. There is a reason they prefer to do their growing underground. They have got used to too much democracy.
Now there is an elected government telling farmers that they don’t understand the benefits of the laws that have been drawn up without — consulting them, including them and going by the nuances,— them. The MSP has been the cushion that has broken the fall of many a farmer and has assured them of securing a projected income. As someone who comes from a family of farmers, I know the struggles undertaken to make ends meet. The back-breaking labour, eyes that have spent more time looking at the sky than at your family, the inability to appreciate the poetry of off-season rain, the mathematics of water sharing, bund making, bund breaking, census of rats, rodents and related pests. And at the end of it all, when the crops come home, it is bliss. Till it is time to start again. It is not a wonder that my family doesn’t farm anymore. This generation is faint hearted.
It is an interesting age to be alive in this country. The most intelligent people govern us. They know everything- about everything. The farmers do not know about farming, the minorities don’t know about citizenship, students do not know how to study, teachers do not know how to teach, comedians don’t know how to crack jokes, they only offend the apex court…I can go on…but there is poetry to come.
What sort of poetry must one write at times like these? When your trust in governance is a sliver of soap under a waterfall and humans have been battling the cold and, in some cases, old age to wrest some form of control over their own destinies. When the world’s largest democracy realises that it has too much democracy,what sort of poetry do we write? Angry? Mournful? Witty? – there—now there is too much of choice. Perhaps we should ban buffet spreads as well.
India in these last couple of years reminds me of America in the Vietnam era. When much of the populace was out on the streets protesting and asking that the violence stop. The tone-deaf regime is yet another stark, staring similarity. It is quite telling that in the ages that followed, amidst all the protests, the activism and the cultural upheaval, what stood out was a music festival in the middle of nowhere, on a sprawling farmland- a festival that set out to sell tickets, but then became free, where the audience helped construct the stage and some stayed back to clean up after. Where for the better part of a weekend, there was music, music and more music. Well, that and a lot of psychedelic drugs and love. Woodstock in 1969, brought the biggest names in music who set anthems for lost youth.
Queen, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Ravi Shankar and Santana were there and so was Janis Joplin- with her persona- a voice way older than her age and pain that knew no name. “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”, she sang in Me and Bobby McGee, a rendition of Kristofferson’s words. And listening to it in these days of constricted throats, I am inclined to believe.
And if it is the power to convince that I am looking for, then I needed to go no further than young Debarshi Mitra, who writes,
You close your eyes and draw a blank. The fog is everywhere around you. The past continues to keep you at bay. Your dreams begin to turn yellow like the flame of a distant star.
(On a Winter Night)
Debarshi has an extraordinary voice that manages to get one to follow it down tricky rabbit holes. Reading the selection for this feature made me think of the scenarios in Alice in Wonderland and numerous smoky memories from past lives. The range that he presents is immense, using the gaps between the words in the text to fashion new narratives.
The night thickens around the bush
not a footstep to be heard
a snake slithers back to the undergrowth.
(Oblivion)
Cities, lives, time, he animates them all and sets them free- there, there it is again- that word. It stains the air we breathe and the flights of birds and the borderlessness of thoughts. The ecosystem that Joplin’s voice occupied seems to be where Debarshi’s poetry resides. The grit, the silk, the strobe lights are a part of his soul too.
There is a great deal of Cyberpunk influences in his poetic imagination and I am sure that William Gibson would appreciate the folds and neural pathways that he lights up with his ability to surprise. And he does surprise in more ways than one. even when he is extravagant in the length of his poems, he is frugal with the amplitude. The stillness of his poetry is commendable. And while he is a physicist at IISER, he also writes poems. If that is not the freedom to be, then what is?
He says, “I’m a theoretical physicist by day. My specialisation is Condensed Matter Physics. My two primary interests:poetry and Physics emerge from similar concerns, that is of understanding and gaining insight. While Physics allows one to build theoretical models for natural processes, poetry offers new ways of interpretation and defamiliarization of lived experience.”
The quest to be unsettled, to be ruffled is an artistic endeavour and Debarshi is the eternal journeyman. The bohemian in him is a kindred spirit to all the songs sung, all the notes played and all the colours that mushroomed at Woodstock decades ago. Those are the songs that last- full throated, bloody and unabashed. His voice belongs to jazz music and vinyl records.
When the common man out on the streets resists with all his might, then the powers that be must sit up and take note. That is the ultimate rule of a democracy. In a land where increasingly symbology, citizenship, history, love, the right to marry- much of what makes us who we are is being dictated, food is a very important frontier. For a regime to dig in its heels and wait out the siege in hopes that a bitter winter will send protesters away, it must be that convinced of its righteousness or of the weakness of the intentions that oppose it.
Perhaps India is ready for its own brand of the Woodstock. A place to sit back and wonder how everything has gone so wrong and when. To throw strictures to the winds and also the rules that govern love- to dream of times when in the span of the same year, migrant workers did not have to walk away from the capital and farmers did not have to march in. There wasn’t too much democracy in that, was there?
“Who you are is what you settle for, you know?” – Janis Joplin
Some days are like that. Perfectly normal. The sun seems to be going about its usual business of glaring down at us in varying degrees of ferocity, the stray dogs mill about on the streets looking as puzzled as ever with their mouths open, yet picking their way across roads with the care that comes of practice and bitter experience. Old men balance things at impossible angles on bicycles and ferry them with the care that comes of practice and seeing mud streets of their youth grow into four lane roadways and the bitter experience of what happens to those who don’t learn from what happens to dogs…. Younger men cross roads feigning nonchalance at the careening traffic. Most people seem to want to get to somewhere that is not here. Fruits, vegetables, restaurants wait patiently. Dust doesn’t distinguish or discriminate. Humidity seeps into crags and crevices, furniture swells. The sort of day when thirsts seek only water. The day seems perfectly normal, poised to drown itself in the polychrome of dusk. But you are not convinced. There is that strange feeling niggling you. Like a gnat. Like a particularly determined mosquito.
On a day like that, afflicted by what I can only call midsummer madness, I ventured out in my car, with the sun almost instantly leaving salt pans on my lips. Apparently, much of the city had the same idea, as people were out in full force, traffic backed up quite a distance. It felt like a pressure cooker had been left on the stove and there was no outlet for the steam. Even with the AC on at full blast, I could feel the blush of a migraine coming on. Something had to give. Something had to break the stasis.
That’s when I spotted a young man, with glorious hair riding pillion on the scooter right ahead of me. The sun was glinting off his hair, bouncing off in different shades of brown. I was mesmerized. The traffic lurched ahead and, in that instant, I enthusiastically stepped on the accelerator and rammed the scooter. In an instant, the world around me changed. The torpor I was experiencing, the migraine that was hovering about, all vanished in that moment of sheer fear.
The scooter had a broken tail light. No one or nothing else was hurt. Except my pride. I apologised and offered payment and thought to myself about the transience of life. Where one minute ago, I was actively seeking out this head of hair, now, it was bouncing around before me and I had absolutely no interest. We bid our goodbyes and went our ways, the traffic eased up. Life flowed over the temporary chasm and left no trace.
In my car, I played some music. And the very first song was Tum pukaar lo…tumhara intezaar hai (Call out to me, you are awaited)from the 1969 Hindi film Khamoshi. Sung in the soulful voice of Hemanth Kumar, the song has a very interesting play of light and shadow. The protagonist, who is a nurse in a mental care institution, has effected a miraculous recovery of her patient Dev. And has in the process, has fallen desperately in love with him. One evening, she is on her way to his room with a gift on his birthday, which is also his last day in the hospital. His parents meet her and thank her. They tell her they will come the following day to collect him and that they have arranged for him to marry the girl whose rejection had caused him to lose his equilibrium. She is shaken by the news. As she slowly climbs the stairs to his room, the shadows from the banisters create bars on her body. Her shadow precedes her into Dev’s room where he is facing an open window and singing of love and of the long wait. Of the desperate silences that seal lips, the narratives of the heart that remain untold, of the nights spent in wakefulness. We never see him. Only the shadows that grow bigger. She finally leaves clutching her gift- a copy of Kalidasa’s Meghdoot.
The Meghdoot is the story of yet another interminable wait. Of a Yaksha banished for neglecting his duties as he was enamoured by his wife. Spending his time atop Mount Kailash, he chances upon a rain cloud and asks it to deliver a message to his wife. The poem that is 111 stanzas long, is essentially the roadmap to the way home. The Yaksha narrates in loving detail, the trees, grass, plants, fountains, rivers- and everything else that the rain cloud will meet on its way. In the end, the banishment is revoked and they are reunited.
The choice of this ancient text as a gift serves to encompass the story of the nurse who fell in love with her patient and thus in an ethically complicated way, both neglected as well as overzealously performed her duties. The shadows cast on her and the walls that surround her in contrast to Dev who stands facing the breeze suggests the shape of things to come. Of the madness that waits just outside the cognitive boundaries of the mind, and which while imprisoning the body, sets the mind free of ties, memories and time. What is time if not a wait?
I have loved the idea of the wait. The many meanings it acquires. In life, in poetry, in art. Dom Moraes writes in Merlin
Centuries I waited to be called. I am now sleeping in a maiden, Bruised with kicks, the cruses of my eyes Once filled with holy oil by Arthur. Brimming with mucus and tears.
The Pendragon said I would never die. This is no longer good news.
Which took me further back to the epigraph of The Wasteland, to those lines from the Satyricon by Petronius where the Sybil of Cumae having erroneously asked for eternal life without eternal youth, waits to die…hopes to die.
The wait is a very certain part of our daily lives. From waiting for the mundane, banal things to happen everyday to waiting for a prayer to be answered, to have a miracle happen…we all wait from one heartbeat to another. While living in a fourth floor flat in Mumbai, I have heard the sounds of the wait in the hollow cough of our taps before the day’s water supply trickled in, having meandered its way up three floors and several families. I have seen the wait become a sinuous, winding organism at the approach of a fast local train at peak hours in Mumbai. The wait is present in flights as well at arrivals in airports. And in some cases, at the departure gates as well.
It takes a very old soul to treat the wait as an ally. To turn away the frenzy that mortality induces. To find circuitous routes to the soul. As AK Mehrotra points out,
….Our days
Filled with insubstantial things,
We dream to make up for lost time.(Summer Notes)
This is also what interests me about Nishi Pulugurtha. The sense of peace that pervades her poetry in the face of the loosening grips on realities, on claims to the self, on places. Reading her verse makes one feels like she speaks from a very alien plane that is confoundingly rooted in our everydays.
There seems to be a stillness No breeze, a sombre silence That is undisturbed A pause, a break.
The wind decides to hold on A bird here and there Not a sound Weighing things. Dead leaves, twigs here and there Broken pieces of glass Littered, left.
(Pauses, published in Muse India)
The structures of her poems, generally jagged, with spaces denoting pauses, are complex. They mirror the workings of the mind. Lucidity and sharpness characterize her lines. The day to day business of living preoccupies Nishi.
But it is while writing about memory or the slow slide towards its involuntary erosion that Nishi is at her best. When asked about this, she revealed the extent of her commitment. “…when I am writing about Alzheimer’s – I write about my personal experiences as a caregiver, about the changes that came in my mother over the years. My aim here is to create an awareness about it. I decided to write poems on it because it affects me a lot.
I should also mention here that I am an Executive Council member of the Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders Society of India, Calcutta Chapter. I have written on the subject for various magazine, newsletters in India and abroad, edit the newsletter of the ARDSI National and speak on the subject at various conferences on the subject too.”
They are white I like the red I like the other colours Some have small holes in them I look at them Take them out, unfold them They lay spread on my bed I leave them there I am looking for something They must be here inside the almirah Why is it opened? Someone must have opened it Why? Was someone looking for something in there? I think someone meant to take away mine. I take out some more sarees I need to put them away safely. Safely.
(Clothes: A Poem, published in Mad in Asia Pacific)
The state of things left as they are, with no memories to qualify them, with no associations that bring their history is a painful one. One that Nishi poignantly conveys. Her keen sense of observation has made the world she occupies into her subject matter. She writes of railway stations, of electricity bills, of festivals and even the humble bitter gourd. But she transforms them into entities that are waiting to germinate. To seek new soil to grow into their promise. Her verse promises a redemption. That the stasis we see around is but a short lived one. It is this promise that keeps her world on its axis.
These promises, big and small, kept, broken, continued…help us keep a hold of our days and nights. The promise of a crystalized day dissolving into a Byzantine night is what we look to the heavens, to the clocks and to our watches for.
No more oceans or rivers, which can help only so much. Forget the cliffs with the views or the tops of mountains and ‘off like a bird.’ They can mean just something when we need everything, distracting with their beauty when we need hard ugliness to bloom, the lily dated, inefficient.
I rarely write about the pandemic. Sure, I buy my masks and sanitize the fingerprints out of my palms…my life-line is almost eroded from all the rubbing- I now know the art of altering destiny. But I don’t write about it. Somehow, I have deluded myself into making this into a waiting game- where I meet my friends in a controlled environment, eat at selected restaurants, speak only to familiar people and never ever shake hands. A hug is an act that is deliberated over and over as something that might not just encroach upon personal space, but also entail endangerment. So, it was a waiting game.
Until that is, India erupted into a rash of epic election rallies, pilgrimages and all forms of intense public participation that required sumo wrestler-style physical contact.
People found time and mental courage to yell slogans through wafer-thin masks, take a dip in the holy Ganges because this festival comes only once in twelve years- never mind that the river was there for centuries- and is still flowing without realizing that it is part of a festival that peaks once in twelve years- and what is a twelve-year cycle in the life of a river that flows through three countries and melds into an ocean. Of course, what is a country for a river? Just another pebble to flow over.
While people were converging at election rallies and river banks, I was rubbing my hands and pretending it was a waiting game. And then, suddenly, we were having the worst humanitarian crisis since the Bengal Famine of 1943. Which was the worst humanitarian crisis in the subcontinent since the Great Bengal Famine of 1770. To call a famine great is, I suppose just a way to distinguish between two famines in the same location. While a famine is not an epidemic, it can lead to one or be the cause of one. And like an epidemic, it is also often, man-made, the result of unimaginative governing actions and a general lack of direction and compassion. Sounds a lot like the situation that we are in right now.
Sometimes, my friends call me up and ask if I miss going out. Because before all hell broke loose, I was the most compulsive ‘go-outer’ you could find. I was forever out there- my home was a place I stopped over before the next time I headed out. It could be to the same place again, the same restaurant, the same mall- to the movies, to the bookshop to gawk at books and some magnificent stationery, to the church to sit in absolute silence and contemplation- to the market- I rarely loiter around in the market. There, I am focused- a woman on a mission- because in the market, they are looking at you, calling out to you- hoping to make a sale, offering you what they think you imagine is a bargain- and I who don’t use a lot of stuff, I am wasting their time. Their time is their money. And also, because, I have to compulsively answer anyone who calls out to me. I look at them and politely say no thank you. And I hate issuing steady refusals. Or because sometimes get stuck into buying things I don’t know what to do with- like a kilogram of tapioca I bought off a woman at the market just because she looked like my grandmother.
I tell those who ask me that I don’t miss going out. I stay at home and listen to the birds, work from home, read and wonder what I did when I went out. I watch movies online, and realise I can do without the popcorn that I thought I absolutely had to have. Recently someone told me they went to a movie hall to watch a film and I was surprised. “Do people do that still?” I asked. I can’t seem to understand the idea of public transport, especially autorickshaws anymore. How does one think it ok to get into one- that’s what I keep thinking. And gradually realizing that this is most probably my own form of trauma that I am dealing with. The loss of a certain gloss off the surface of my life. The acute awareness of the singularity of existence.
It has become important to tell yourself to be grateful you get to stay home. That you are putting yourself out of harm’s way and in the process, helping stop a pandemic in its tracks- so you don’t suffer from survivor’s guilt or the intense awareness of not having to earn from day to day. It is a form of morally ambiguous respiration. And a peeling back of the eyelids to stare directly at the velocity of noise that is generated. Of propaganda. Of self-righteous misleading and soap-opera theatrics and tears that pervade the air waves every day. In lieu of a planned, reassuring system of preventive care.
India’s vaccine diplomacy, procurement policy, credibility of news, the worth placed on the lives of its citizens- all look like they have a long way to go. But go where? In which direction? I have people telling me about people disappearing from their contact lists, entire families laid low, children losing both parents… when the world get a handle on this situation, then the social and psychological cost of the pandemic will set us back by a couple of decades. New and intelligent policies will have to be devised for children orphaned, for families who have lost the earning members of their families, preventive measures to stop possible exploitation through trafficking of various kinds. What sort of society will be growing out of these cuts remains to be seen. But in the absence of a conscientious social welfare and watchdog system, the future is as bleak as the present.
There is nowhere to go and lull the million voices that you keep at bay as you go from wall to wall, doing your daily chores, grateful to be alive, rubbing your hands- in a conspiratorial gesture to stay alive, dreading the next disappearance from your contact list, looking at obituaries of strangers in the newspaper and mentally checking their date of departure to then guess if they might have died of COVID-19 or other reasons.
Who knows what will turn up in your Sent Mail, under your trolling history, on your
caller ID, slaughtering what cow, the counter a mess after you’ve descended
at midnight to hear Agamemnon on his wife, Tantalus on thirst, Sisyphus
pushing his load even over a meal as you eat your way back to those who wait.
…says Sandra Kolankiewicz. In her these and many, many other poems, Sandra looks at mortality as though she holds it in the palm of her hands- as though she is holding a moth- (a word that sounds very much like death in Hindi)- fascinated and terrified of its colours and designs. Sandra’s world is one that acknowledges mortality and phantasmagoria as faithful companions. The apocalypse is around the corner and it may not be such a bad thing after all, she thinks.
Her love has the acidity of lime and the departed come back to stand at the foot of the bed just to remind people of what could have been. The immediate rootedness of Sandra’s poetry is carried on the shoulders of an aching knowledge- of responsibility, of culpability, of wistfulness, an ardent desire to tamper with the dynamics of Time.
I can’t write of the oceans without seeing that landmass of plastic swirling in the Pacific, bigger than Pitcairn Island, the consequences of mutiny against the natural world. Squeeze a rock, drain the dirt to get plastic. Scrape a sticky flower center for the smell of forget what we deserve. Likewise that sacred cliff from which the ancestors watched us from above had no means to protect itself, face blown off to reveal the images of idols, their feet down in the clay on which we stand to admire them.
Says John Guzlowski, about The Way You Will Go, Sandra’s collection of poems, “We’ve been taught to expect comfort from our poetry, the poet telling us about the truth at the heart of our yearning: the mother who loves her child more than anything, the father who returns from war to find his house still standing. But this is not what Sandra Kolankiewicz wants to talk to us about. She is the poet of mysteries, the real ones that hide in the most common things (a pet rabbit, a child’s dollhouse), and elegies for what we’ve lost and what we’re losing and what we will lose. She has the gift the great poets have, the gift of telling us what we’ve lost in language so beautiful and rich that it almost makes us forget our loss.
You’re probably right; no one counts but you. We have no credibility. We’re the people in the rabble who understand if we didn’t impose, you’d ignore us, wouldn’t step up to help, would even sniff like a gentleman who sneers when he is not. If you had been educated on curbs in this city, a result of where you are from, off the normal boundaries, your childhood an estate with no sidewalks past the bus lines, you would know that slaves cut them from single slabs of rock, something you have always taken for granted as if mid- way between the walk and street just for you.
The other day, during an online meeting, a colleague coughed- twice- and I asked her in a playfully-fearful voice, “Are you ok? You seem to be coughing a lot.” Laughing, she answered- its just a common cough. And I said, “This is not the common cough anymore. This is the uncommon variety. The common sort of cough is the other one.” Common, uncommon- everything is being turned on its head. Even pineapple upside down cake has begun making sense.
In such a world, the verses of Sandra Kolankiewicz come across as pungent, hard hitting and unapologetic. They speak plainly about the imbalance that exists between a world that should have been and a world that is. She doesn’t nurture fault lines. Rather, she holds them out- jagged and broken- to be thought about within the confines of walls, in the engulfing darknesses of movie halls or jammed between soft apologies and refusals while walking through a market when an old woman who looks like your grandmother stops you and offers you what she thinks you will think is a bargain. And today, the way the world is…by God you would take it.
It threatens to rain on most evenings these days. The sky begins to brood around 3 pm, the breeze refuses to blow. Everything is static. Sullen. Even the slightest movement makes perspiration break out. A stray salty bead or a veritable soaking . . . Rorschach patterns of sweat stains on clothes. People go about with shiny faces and mostly bewildered expressions as though asking “how did it get so hot?” There are wistful reminiscences about past decades when it was not so hot and the obligatory anger over climate change before sheepishly reaching for the AC remote. This is rounded off with the dire prediction to watch out for April and May when it can only get hotter.
Meanwhile, it becomes darker outside. The birds decide to pack it in and go home. Dogs walk about listlessly with their tongues hanging out. An almost ominously pleasant breeze stirs the tree tops and the trees…wily creatures…use this opportunity to shed a few flowers and dry leaves when no one is watching. I am quite amused by this behaviour of the trees…hardly any indication of rain can go by without this sort of surreptitious shedding.
On such semi-recumbent evenings, as I drive home from work, I imagine rain clouds gathering force, preparing to bring on their fury, that the water will cleanse the city and by extension, my car. I also think of the time I stood on the edge of rain. It was an afternoon; I was travelling in an autorickshaw. It was raining beautifully. When I reached my destination, and got out…with no umbrella, I realised that the rain was falling on only one half of me. I looked at the road and found that from the point where I stood, it wasn’t raining any further. I had stood on edges of precipices, roads, deserts, razors…but not at the edge of rain. Though there were at least fifty other people standing there, I would like to believe that only I noticed this. That it was an experience sent only for me.
A really good rain is like a fierce argument. It starts slow, comes down hard and determined and long after it is over, it continues in rivulets, in the ruts on mud roads, in the splashes on passing vehicles…everyone takes a bit of the rain as they go along. And you go on hearing its echoes long after it has stopped. Watching the rains makes me really thirsty. Like I ought to open my mouth and swallow in long, deep gulps, the sheets of water that flow down ridges, shingles, eaves and downspouts of houses…the metaphors of never quenched thirsts sit alongside those of sweeping deserts in my mind. And later, much later, I can hear the gurgle of water, cheered on by lusty frogs, draining away into a thread-like brook behind my house. That is of course the monsoon that imperiously visits these shores in June and July or the rain brought on by whimsical depressions off the Arabian Sea or the Indian Ocean. Off late, these have become typhoons or cyclones and have made the enjoyment of rain an exercise in guilt and entitlement. Now one looks for innocent rains. Those which don’t bring devastation and displacement with them. Rains that can be enjoyed without fear. Like the ones they used to anticipate every year in my village.
Those rains would mean plentiful crops and when I saw the young paddy stalks bravely standing up, craning their necks to the sky, I used to think…this is what rains can do. There was a well by the fields…where the women would gather every morning and evening. The more active ones would draw water for themselves and for others. There was a lot of chatter and laughter and possibly power politics that I was too young to understand. All I knew was that my aspiration was to grow strong enough to be able to draw water from that well, pour it into a plastic pot and carry it on my hip to the house. The feminist politics of water bearing hadn’t percolated my consciousness. I was after all 6. When it rained, this well would fill to the brim. And on occasion, overflow. It was frightening and fascinating. The women could just skim the water off the top of the well and be on their way. I used to wonder what would happen if one jumped into the well at such a time…would they be able to swim from edge to edge? Mind you, the well wasn’t a very wide one.
So, a couple of days after a torrential downpour, I went down with my aunts to the well. Sure enough, it stood like a beacon of light…a ring made of liquid silver…water sloshing around the rim…spilling over when people skimmed water. As the women were waiting around for the rest of the posse to arrive, no one was paying me any attention and out of sheer boredom, I floated a pot onto the well. The pot bobbed, fell to its side and began taking in water rapidly. All of us watched in a mix of horror and tension as the pot took in more water, moved to the centre of the well and began a gradual submerging. It turned upright and began its journey down the neck of the well. For a while we could see it…imprisoned in water…water that seemed semi solid…like jelly. No one dared look further.
I was forever banned from going anywhere near the well.
Decades later, this year, when it threatens to rain on most afternoons, I have, for no conceivable reason, been thinking of that day. The concerned look on my grandmother’s face when I was brought home, a frightened, shivering bundle of a child…the days of fever that followed…that had nothing to do with the monsoons that I was generally so vulnerable to. It was the sinking of the pot. Something that happened so quickly and so casually…like passing a cup of tea. The eerie silence that followed the final burp with which the pot went down. The matter of fact-ness of its sinking. That no one dared go rescue the pot. That the rains, the well, the water…who were my friends had another side to them. That things can transform so quickly and bare their fangs. It was fear. For the first time I felt fear.
As the world squirms in the grip of the vast unknown…of a pandemic, of the miasma of propaganda, of suffering…such suffering…one might wonder about what something familiar such as the rains might bring. Some hint of comfort? Some promise that certain things are a constant? I read these promises in the poems of Ricardo Plata whom we feature this time.
He brings in the known, the experienced and it feels talismanic as we hold his words in our hands. He writes in Spanish and is read in translation. There is an intense musicality in his works that I have gleaned with my rudimentary understanding of the language.
To inhabit my body that cell with thin bars, I must admit, a body is a prison of memory.
Benedictions, homecomings, love, its tangibility and the vast journeys the mind undertakes … these form the core of his poetry.
He writes in Mario likes Instability
Mario recognises his solitude, is identical to mine, which leads us to live in circles in flames, searching again, and thinking that the love of one’s life is found when everyone falls silent in the middle of a party.
His lines are youthful, they carry the boisterousness of a raucous life that the young enjoy, or aspire to. There is a celebration of the multitude. People in their variegated existences, come and go in his poems.
In My Parents Brought Me to Life to Die, he talks about birth, the promises that life is supposed to present, the gardens of papier mâché that he makes… “my skeleton is made of bread and promises, and my future is a concern that I never survive.” That it rained on the day he was born as though it was a baptism…as though it was a welcome.
The haunting sensibilities that his poems present, in their hope that is offset by desolation, the sounds fading into silence, the lives of people nearer to his home, that are for me, a world away…fill me with a sense of wonder at the sameness and the uniqueness of experiences.
I found Ricardo Plata to be apt for uncertain times like these.
Though the rains threaten…it rarely does rain, the sky broods…the trees shake themselves free of leaves and flowers, the birds go home and then, like a child who once set a pot adrift in the middle of an overflowing well, the clouds recoil and move away. Bearing too much knowledge. Never to return.
A few weeks ago, when I was at a friend’s place, waving my arms and talking animatedly, I received a phone call that brought news of an impending demise. Having suddenly run out of oxygen, I walked to the balcony and stood looking outside at what I now recall to be one of the most arid afternoons I have encountered. There was absolute silence everywhere save for a very shrill squirrel whose cries were banging insistent nails into the coffin of an afternoon. I spotted an old lady in the house opposite who had come out to sit on her verandah to guard a tray of rice grains left out in the sun. She sat there desultorily, not even looking at the tray, perhaps because no bird seemed even remotely interested in taking a peck. It made me wonder if that is what life is all about, taking up cudgels in a battle that is not even being fought, competing in a race that is not even yours to begin with- while an invisible squirrel barks angrily at the world, Gods, the trees or perhaps at its own self.
A lot has been written about this year that is like no other. About the isolations that humans, thoughts, homes, non-humans and others were subjected to. About hope, the loss of hope, the return of hope, the scope of hope. The landscapes of living memories have been altered irretrievably and the timeline of life has a before and an after.
Ironically, for a country that had one of the longest periods of complete lockdowns, much of India ended up spending most of its time outdoors. The protests against the NRC and the CAA saw droves of people occupying spaces such as Shaheen Bagh, till the pandemic forced them inside, the leaders of Kashmir were under house arrest for such a long time that by the time they came out, PUBG and TikTok had been banned in India, there was a need to formulate new alliances, Kangana Ranaut’s house was partly demolished and a certain white beard grew as long as Pinocchio’s nose. Tunnels- the longest and strongest came up, the Parliament complex in Delhi was no longer the same, grounds were broken at Central Vista, Ayodhya and so were promises made to farmers, landless labourers, women and to those suffering from the indignities of the caste system. There were lines of migrant workers going home, returning to work from home, dying en route, living to tell the tales of unexpected kindness, of apathy, of fighting primal battles of survival.
This year saw major discussions on medical terminology and I’m positive that the word ‘quarantine’ has entered the parlance of non-English languages worldwide. So have ‘Mask’ and ‘Sanitizer’. And now that the world is slowly allowing traffic to flow through its veins, masks have become a common site in the garbage heaps of landfills and in the usual refuse strewn along roads. The sheer variety of masks, the designs and patterns they come in, amuses me. If anything, it is this that symbolizes the human spirit- the ability to turn anything into fashion.
It has been a learning curve- this year. That the ‘absolute and urgent’ fulfilment of rituals in places of worship can be postponed. That both hell and heaven might well be on earth and exist only till the time you are alive. And that human nature does not change. That at the slightest sign of recovery, the prejudices are back, the constructs of memory, entitlement, all come rushing back like they had never left.
We now live in a world that has lost the voices we knew, the faces that defined it, the people whose blood and poetry gave it life. Today, as I write this, we are in a world without Mangalesh Dabral and Sugatha Kumari.We must also remember those serving the nation from jail. Varavara Rao, Surendra Gadling, writer-activist Sudhir Dhawale, Mahesh Raut, Shoma Sen, Arun Ferreira, Sudha Bharadwaj, Vernon Gonsalves, Anand Teltumbde, Gautam Navlakha, Rona Wilson, Hany Babu, Stan Swamy. Swamy’s lines from prison- as a letter to his fellow religious- say it all. All that a human life should be about. And all that it should not be about.
Prison life a great leveler
Inside the daunting prison gates All belongings taken away But for the bare essentials
‘You’ comes first ‘I’ comes after ‘We’ is the air one breathes
Nothing is mine Nothing is yours Everything is ours
No leftover food thrown away All shared with the birds of the air They fly in, have their fill and happily fly out
Sorry to see so many young faces Asked them: “Why are you here”? They told it all, not mincing words
From each as per capacity To each as per need Is what socialism all about
Lo, this commonality is wrought by compulsion If only all humans would embrace it freely and willingly All would truly become children of Mother Earth
While all over the world, prisoners are being released to prevent prison overcrowding and infection, we have poets, activists- keepers of our conscience- under lock and key. Under house arrest is our conscience as well. Like the parents of the raped girl from Hathras. Medha Patkar sprinted 100 metres or more to join the protesting farmers in Delhi. Those farmers intelligently came in massive tractors and trailers and refused to assemble in another ground that they described as a “prison”. Incarceration and its many, many forms- open skies, captive audiences, radio programmes, news channels for hire.
The year continues to leave its impact on us- an impact that will continue for a long time. The only thing we can do is remember- remember who we are, what we have done, how and to whom or for whom. How would we like to be remembered? We must write of these times, write of the losses, the gains, the love, the pain, the sacrifice. Because, memory is the only weapon one has against the ravages of time. To be remembered is to be alive. In more ways than one. Anaerobically.
This edition of SamyuktaPoetry has Calendar Year as its theme and we are proud to present poems that cover the trajectories of land, mind, faith, history, body, identity, love, anticipation and isolation. Strong poems that sing full throated of their despair, their anger, their wistful farewells. Our tones are evocative, sardonic, soft as a feather landing on felt, angry yowls in a howling snowstorm.
“A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground,” said Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. But nowhere did he say that they must be our kith and kin. This time, let our celebrations mark our survival and be tinged with respect and the memory of those who did not, let us be responsible for the sake of those who are struggling with their health- mental and physical, the precarity of lives of those who speak for others and remember those who cannot speak for themselves. Let us look at the palms of our hands and in the lines etched therein, discover the paths that we have traversed, our histories, our mythologies and our ephemeral existences. This world that is too much with us looks for concrete absolutes. Dead certainties, certificates of birth, documentation, ownership, possession, cards, papers, eugenics and currencies for leaving us our inheritances.
I think back to a blazing afternoon, when a squirrel cried for the canon ball of grief that Time left me holding.
Sonya J. Nair Editor
Kashiana Singh
Chittrakatha1 – last night with her at the care ward
I have it down to a science but they say it is an art too I have been shaping mantras from my lips to yours my eyes are waterfalls they travel into yours that night, I had brought your favorite books along you preferred silence, your fingers encasing my spine they knew each vertebra, its code I wipe you down, cooling your fever reminding you about your tinctured tongue– sharp and electric how my words have spent centuries inside your spinal fluid syllable by syllable embedding stubborn stories from my atlas to your axis
I grasp at your iris, the fish floating inside them, they mist over for one last time, as if to sip at the full bellied cry that is rising in me, your pulse gripping my fingertips as I listen to your errant beating at Erb’s point— lub dub lub dub lub dub perfect punctuations a dancing wind chime I cover your absent face with one porous poem the final one, an obituary written by your bedside I let it unfurl, like a new born leaf it bleeds a hibiscus into your veins as they calcify, I braid your hair and as they get ready with a checklist I sterilize my hands with your stillness
Chitrakatha – chitra meaning picture and katha meaning story. Chitrakatha is the Indian cultural tradition of women narrating stories with a visual aid.
Forbidden fruits
homesick… an edible canopy of fiery blossoms
fallen mangoes… I bottled my pickles before quarantine
last summer – an aromatic sherbet of alphonso juice
forbidden fruits… maa slices mangoes for me on zoom
lost cities
What will we do to not become cities ravaged by war, a troy fallen to greeks meteorological omens, all doubts cast away with the rising of a blood moon one conquering, another falling, the moon rising against the wall of minds an eclipsed sky
What will we do to not become cities eclipsed by prophetic moons, where God’s or Goddesses stare helplessly when we march towards armies only to bring home dismantled suns and lunar lit chants
What will we do to not become cities humming of oceans, lashed sleepless by the hollowed tide, her water bed lays wrinkled, its furrows blooming with final moon flowers, as we tread sdrawkcab backwards like our dead
Kashiana Singh lives in Chicago and embodies her TEDx talk theme of Work as Worship into her everyday. Her poetry collection, Shelling Peanuts and Stringing Words presents her voice as a participant and an observer. Her chapbook Crushed Anthills is a journey through 10 cities – a complex maze of remembrances to unravel. Her poems have been published on various platforms including Rattle Poetry, Poets Reading the News, Visual Verse, Oddball Magazine, Café Dissensus. She serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor for Poets Reading the News.
Kashiana carries her various geographical homes within her poetry.
Ra Sh
Signboards the Flood Spared
1.NON-HINDUS-NO ENTRY
The copper plated roof of the seven hundred year old temple struggled briefly for air before going down. Hindu bubbles kept floating to the surface till a Christian boat named Daivasahayam moored itself to the temple mast.
DOG – BEWARE
The German shepherd in the kennel could not break the gate open, but a pack of mongrels had made the roof their home and knew how to howl when choppers approached.
NO TRESSPASSERS
When the owners returned, apart from clay and weeds, they found a cobra in the prayer room and a viper in the yoga room.
BEGGING IS PROHIBITED
They begged for life on a top floor balcony to the wind and the rain and the distant thunder of choppers surveying aerially.
(With inputs by Rajesh Nandiyankode)
Last Global Warning
Dear sluggish earthworm Don’t burrow the earth You may be cemented.
Dear sprightly grasshopper Don’t hop around in vain You may be skewered.
Dear shiny loony moon Don’t show your bright face You may be eclipsed.
Dear sweet mynah Don’t sing so loud Your voice may be severed. Dear green peacock Don’t dance in public You may be maimed.
Dear little sparrow Don’t get raped You could be jailed
Dear distant pole star Don’t show us the way. You may be blinded.
Your genocide is on its way. Your terminator has landed. He works alphabetically.
The Unbearable Yellowness of Yellow Deaths Yellow me lives in a mustard yellow yello house with yellow walls and a yellow window from which I can see a yellow road winding its way to a yellow hill. a yellow tree with yellow blossoms greet me every yellow morning. I sleep on a yellow bed and watch a yellow sun pouring in through the yellow foliage. Beyond the casuarinas tress yellow plumes rise from cremated kids with yellow bloated faces and yellow eyes.
Yellowest room of this yellow home houses a yellow serpent who when roused from her yellow slumber lasting many yellow centuries, slither into my bed throwing a yellow coil around me. She hisses, “hey yellow poet, write with my forked yellow tongue. Write two yellow poems at a stroke, one for yellow me and one for yellow you.” That’s when I shed my yellow skin and become a yellow phallus stylus pen squirting yellow ink about yellow deaths of yellow kids.
Ra Sh (Ravi Shanker N.) has published English-language poems in many national and international online and print magazines. His poems have been translated into German and French. He has published three collections of poetry – Architecture of Flesh by Poetrywala, Mumbai, The Bullet Train and other Loaded Poems by Hawakal Prokashana, Kolkota and Kintsugi by Hadni by RLFPA Editions, Kolkata. His translations into English include a biography Mother Forest (of C.K. Janu) by Women Unlimited, two collections of poems Waking is Another Dream (Sri Lankan Tamil resistance poems) by Navayana and How to Translate an Earthworm (an anthology of 101 contemporary Malayalam poems translated to English) by Dhauli Books, a collection of essays Kochiites ( Bony Thomas on the migrant communities in Kochi) by Greenex and two collections of short stories Harum Scarum Saar and other Stories (Bama) by Women Unlimited and Don’t Want Caste (stories by Malayalam Dalit writers) by Navayana.
Shobhana Kumar
Questions I ask myself
If you could be equal in an unequal world, where would you plant your feet?
On a floor that slips with alarming regularity, or a place where holding your ground requires everyday battles?
Whose hand would you hold?
Would you get ahead or stay back?
Would you bend to pick up the remnants or will you leave without a trace, all the lives that have held place for you?
Remnants
The kiosk is run by a lady who opens shop at 7 in the evening everyday. In the corporate world, she may have won accolades for her punctuality. But here, there’s only the haphazard queue of auto drivers, cab drivers, and daily wage labourers that squat on plastic stools and eat, perhaps their first meal of the day. She has always been generous with her portions.
Now, there is only a dark pool of oil that her kerosene stove has spilt.
Kiosks don’t qualify for essential services.
moonbow no omens for the future in sight
*Forthcoming in a book of haibun published by Red River
Blur
Home chores stretch between walls into predictable loops.
Work piles cloud after cloud and splashes into a pot of milk that has just boiled over.
At night they come together like angry lovers, each, incomplete, promising to draw their boundaries firmer the next morning.
Shobhana Kumar has two books of poetry and six works of non-fiction covering industrial and corporate histories. She works in the spaces of education, communications and social work. She is Associate Editor of Sonic Boom and its imprint, Yavanika Press. She is deeply influenced by haikai writing and her book of haibun, A Sky Full of Bucket Lists is forthcoming by Red River. She is part of The Quarantine Train, a poetry workshop founded by Arjun Rajendran. She works in the spaces of corporate communication, branding & advertising, education and social work.
Huzaifa Pandit
We remember when there was only the rain
We remember when there was only the rain, nothing but the rain. The rain chain stitched itself to our hearts till our hearts hung out their crimson shadows to dry in the famished sun. We too remember when there was only the silence, nothing but silence. We lent silence a language but nobody came to console us. Only the birds born out of our rubble wept in our ruins and time hurried past us with our yesterdays in its luggage. We forgot when we tumbled out of tomorrow with the gauze of bleeding clouds flung over our slumped shoulders. Our destinies were shattered on the pavements, and the soldiers picked up pieces of to use as looking mirrors and stroke their guns with the pride of careless death.
We remember when there were only the shadows, nothing but the shadows. We cremated our names on water to reach the other side where you stood waiting with open arms in the land of your siege and my siege, the perfume of ripe wheat in your moist eyes. Be our shadow between the two wars on our glass maps. Take us to your gardens laden with cherry blossom, sprinkle us with rose-water and comb our wheat in the prisons of your names. What was the point of your waiting, who do we await in the long winter? Did the poets not warn us to lock our sleep weary doors, as all promises stood broken. Nobody came, the shikara wala laments, and I complete the verse: Nobody will now come here, nobody.
Our poem is in your manacled hands and can comb its fingers through our forgotten songs sung when we return dead from destiny’s road. We kiss the poem, surrender our hearts and ask: Who are you? Who are we?
Letter to a Lost Lover in Kashmir
Every window owns a voice Though not one speaks to me.
I am lost in such a crowd Where my only company is me.
– Sabir Zafar
Faiz, you summed it right:
Who dares the courage to request now? Who bears the patience to endure now?
I can hardly shake off the fear off me, but how does one persuade the heart to write off its obstinacy? Neither any plea for meeting admitted, nor any grievance redressed. Tyrant, how merciless is your regime: All the rights of the broken heart have been suspended.
Freshly metalled roads lead to wary mountains and wintered gardens in the upturned valley – ashen white and stale green, in jaded wallpapers. Special SRTC buses meet to auction generous routes to relish the barricaded world. There are great attractions indeed, but what use are they when elegy is prohibited to me? The rains of my misfortune didn’t choose a stranger’s roof.
Those stars, we stole from the impossible seas of blood in the dug mountains and strung into three constellations (if our two ran out, we kept one for a rainy day) were gunned down too right in the heart of my sky. Perhaps some prophet will glide over now and resurrect them from saffron graves. Perhaps, I could then empty the sea of long death between us, and nail to it my leaking palms with the syllables of your memory. From me, ailing from you, the furry hands of death will, perhaps, exorcise the mortgaged plagues of memory. My sutured memory leans back on the benches of superiority stroking your blood matted hair with rock-hard guns.
The awaara was used to conversing with the black roses blooming in the undug bazaars. Will he too need to be diagnosed, medicated and counselled for generic anxiety? Will you steal the scars of your memory from him too, the scars which are full moons now?
Someone wake you up, tear you up, grieve over you, when I come back home late midnight someone sigh over you and console in hushed whispers: indeed, you have suffered greatly till now, you have walked alone and burnt in our fires alone. Come, walk beside me come, let us walk a new journey, come walk, make me your witness and walk.
How long more dear heart, how much more life like this? Saif, we too never wonder at the dead. Death must’ve been the only approved remedy.
Huzaifa Pandit is the author of Green is the Colour of Memory which won the first edition of Rhythm Divine Poets Chapbook Contest, 2017. Besides he is the winner of several poetry contests like Glass House Poetry Competition and Bound Poetry Contest. Born and raised in Kashmir, his poems alternate between despair, defiance, resistance and compliance as they seek to make sense of a world where his identity is outlawed. His inspirations in poetry can be guessed from the topic of his PhD: “Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish – Poetics of Resistance” pursued at the University of Kashmir.
Dr. Arya Gopi
IS AN ECHO OF AN ECHO OF AN ECHO, AN ECHO?
I echo sounds of all blind tongues of the hushed era I echo the thud of axes of all ellipses of hunter tales I echo snores of flaws in history of all uprooted souls I echo the legacy of traditional woes of invisible routes I echo the scream of a molested infant of all abused childhood I echo the fear of mothers who lack their home anywhere on this earth I echo the vibe of leaves of a tree in which I listen to myself I echo the grave of immortelle which lives after death on cemetery blankets I echo hooting of nocturnal nights of all circadian rhythms I echo downpour of menstruating moons of dawn and dusk of all stains of being I echo voices of vanquished queens of all incredible empires I echo loudness of the laugh of medusa of all hairy snakes I echo the rising sun of timid ones who never sets every evening I echo the prodigal of love and trials of all mysteries I echo charlatans of all arts of suicidal moments I echo sleepless midnight blues of erotic smuts leftover in the master bedroom I echo dumb words which had drown in the lethe I echo the sleepless nights drowned in the alchemy of woes I echo the violent puffing of all pathogenic influenzas of myriad times I echo weeping of extinct words thrown out of dictionary I echo ignorance of lurches of leaps of all dead parents I echo the noisy flight of blow flies with mouthful of impatience I echo thud of fire of flood of crystallized cadence of sin I echo compromises of obedient life which doesn’t have its own silhouette I echo the anesthetized words of all dirty games I echo slogans of the slippery ideologies of voluptuous politics I echo ancestral contour of runaway of organic whorls I echo the invisible calendar days which is the unseen facades of menstruating lockdowns I echo wars of silent prayers of all countless echoes of echoes…
Arya Gopi is a bi-lingual poet who works in English and Malayalam with half a dozen published books including four Malayalam poetry collections. Her first English title Sob of Strings was published in 2011. A contributor to major journals and anthologies, she has won several awards which includes the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Kanakasree Award, Kerala State Youth Welfare Board Swami Vivekananda Yuva Pratibha Award, Kerala State Youth Commission Youth Icon Award, International ONV Foundation Yuva Award, Vyloppily Award, She is also a regular presence in the Malayalam literary events. She teaches Literature at Zamorin’s Guruvayurappan College, Calicut University.
Upasana Das
Starry Nights
It’s the night sky and I’m looking for stars and I can’t find any but I have hope but I will be here tomorrow and Alone and single and On the rough lonely bed but I will search for stars but I don’t do it every night and.
Upasana Das is a postgraduate student in the Department of English, Jadavpur University. She is a writer, artist, translator and academic. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, modernist studies, visual culture and performance studies. Furthermore, she also researches the interconnectivity of literature, film, theatre, comics and the other arts.
Dr. Archana Bahadur Zutshi
Mitigated Response
Not one or two but five of them, Caught in a limbo, it was a knock, Sudden, as the preparations were on – Of the long awaited marriage of their aging daughter. She too was among those Who boarded the ambulance, Quarantine zone was awaiting them Away from home.
People seem to have been nudged Into a slow motion jamboree, The protestations, quirky medication bills, Have failed their nerves.
They all huddled gradually in the omnibus, Sauntered into the waiting hulk As the driver kept reminding It was not solely at their command.
My afterthoughts were the wedding Is still twelve days apart, Mitigating, unsuspecting snatches. How slow life has become And death seems to be in a snatching hurry!
Dr. Archana Bahadur Zutshi has two volumes of poetry, Poetic Candour and The Speaking Muse, available on Amazon. She is a bilingual poet – translator, author of chapters in literary texts and co-author of twelve international anthologies. An accomplished poet who has been a judge for online contests and a winner several times, the ‘Culturium’ (March 18, 2019) features her and her poems. Her works have appeared in All Poetry, United by Ink, Spillwords, Confluence, Setu, The Bilingual Journal, The Madras Courier, MirrorSpeak and the Indian Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies.
Shruti Sareen
The Preamble and Power Politics
I first read the Preamble in class seven The Indian constitution seemed straight out of heaven I looked up at my mother with eyes lit bright And found in hers a reflection of my delight
Now the constitution lies torn, disregarded Surreptitiously before us the manusmriti is paraded Slowly we celebrate Gandhi’s murder Stop mourning his death, I shudder
Innocent people are imprisoned, killed, lynched The courts bat not an eyelid, nor flinch I realise I must dispense with rhyme Which represents a youthful, childhood time
I see a world enmeshed in power I see ordinary people trapped in nets Lives and homes so fragile Big men rich men orchestrate And snap power hungry fingers Which cost lives and deaths in faraway places anonymous people, anonymous spaces They will never know about, nor care about. Common people like us prance-dance to their tunes In this circus-ring, who’s the top master, Who’s the elephant jumping fire And who’s watching?
Shruti Sareen, born and brought up in Varanasi, studied at Rajghat Besant School, KFI. Graduating in English from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, she later earned a PhD in Indian English Poetry from the same university. She has had over a hundred poems and a handful of short stories published in journals and anthologies. She is currently seeking publishers for her novel. Her debut poetry Collection, A Witch Like You, is forthcoming from Girls on Key Poetry (Australia) in April 2021.
Dr. Sabreen Ahmed
Mother Tongue Blues
A human, a woman, a netizen of India, A native axomiya -a goriya or ‘miya‘, a deshi, jolha or a baganiya I am all in flesh and blood one yet i deeply crib when one asks— what is my mother tongue? I blast out at the computer operator at the NRC hearing centre who is rude to my septuagenarian father and uncle and repeats— what is our mother tongue? He has never heard of the term ‘Axomiya Mosolman’. I was enraged, but he was just doing his job, yet why i crib when one asks— What is my mother tongue? The lockdown did no better Those who couldn’t spit on the streets Spat venom on their screens Some sane, some insane and some obscene Yet all in flesh and blood one And still I crib when one asks— What is my mother tongue?
Endnote
No words nor dreams no sorrow or screams can reach my mind now a tabula rasa. There are no more echoes of the soprano of those bygone sagas of love as I harp on to the encircling vistas of surmounting hatred I move apart to untrammelled pastures of darkness. Walking with the sophistry of the mind over lanes and streets in unseen starry nights, a masked woman am l, I hide my brazenness to walk on with a clogged up brain. I know not where to stop and etch my destiny in the lost footprints of time
Dr. Sabreen Ahmed has received her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in Feb 2013. Her area of interest is Gender studies, South Asian English Writing and Contemporary Theory. She has published an anthology of poems entitled Soliloquies (2016) and has also edited a UGC Sponsored National Seminar Proceeding captioned Indian Fiction in English and the Northeast (2016). Currently she teaches in the Dept of English, Nowgong College, Nagaon, Assam, India. She writes poems, short stories, articles, book reviews etc for several webzines in India like Café Dissensus, The Thumbprint, The Citizen, Feminism in India, The Assam Tribune and so on.
Uma Valluri
The treasure I was sitting on
A brand new car and miles to go The year started with great gung-ho
Overland drives and overseas tour The road beckoned with its own allure
And then came March and the deadly virus No big deal, it can’t be happening to us
A curfew day turned into weeks of lockdown And weeks turned into months of global meltdown
Make do with less, make do online A new life emerged, called it quarantine
And out of the blue I got literally smitten With vegetables, grains and more from my kitchen
Faces, scenes, birds, animals and flowers Kitchen art engaged me longer than hours
In English and Hindi, words would flow Likes and followers began to grow
My cycle became my bosom friend Walks and long rides made a lovely blend
Clocked more than a thousand miles Far exceeded by the number of my smiles
The year that was, unusual no doubt Turned my life upside down and inside out
The treasure was right here and right now Every moment was indeed a big wow!
After 35 years of a professional life spanning academics and industry, as a computer scientist, Uma prefers to just engage in activities that she enjoys or is good at, like mentoring students and teachers and life coaching. In the process of working with her own challenges, in the last 20 years, she has analysed life from different perspectives. Creating art from material available in her kitchen – vegetables, pulses, grains, fruits, peels, cutlery, pasta, noodles, papad… has opened up vistas of inspiration for her. The road and its sights and adventures hold great fascination for this avid driver.
Sometimes, a beam of light from the lighthouse of the mind falls on a house that floats on the sea of memories. It was an old house….nearly two hundred years old. Generations of my family lived there…so did generations of wild honeybees. There was a verandah where, in the afternoons, the most wonderful breeze swept in. It lulled the coconut palms, the Gulmohar tree, the cows and me- a very tiny kid then- into the most delicious stupor. But I was scared of sleeping on the verandah. My grandmother had warned me about burly gypsies who carried gunny sacks and stuffed sleeping children into them. And being the gullible kind of grandchild that I once was, I believed her. Why would I not? A grandmother who made the most wonderful dried, salted mango pickles was never to be disbelieved. I remember squatting by her side as she laid out those slivers of mangoes dipped in brine on a straw mat. And when they were finally, properly set, she gave me leave to eat as much as I wanted. It was in this house that I saw chickens hatching, spiders with silk purses, cows giving birth, moonlight streaming through squares of glass placed between terracotta tiles on the roof.
Such was the impact all this made on me that sometimes, I have found myself retracing these paths, hoping to feel a sense of wonder, glee or maybe love. Once, as a newly minted Assistant Professor, I walked around the campus with my colleagues and stopped short before salted mangoes drying on a straw mat in front of the canteen. I picked up a piece and tasted it. There was just salt and mango. And the distinct aftertaste of knowledge. Always a bad idea.
The house is no more. The people are no more. My grandmother, bless her, lives elsewhere- far, far away, her world shrunk to a bedroom. And I who remain, think of gypsies bearing gunny sacks full of small children, catch clusters of memories that like the seeds of the Gulmohar, explode and shatter on silent afternoons. On really dark nights, in my mind, the house stands bathed in liquid light.
This is why, reading Poornima Laxmeshwar is like a personal pilgrimage for me. Her lucid use of memory, the style of narration, the astringent touch of knowledge resonates with all those who stitch their past and present.
On pleasant January mornings, Kaku wakes us up to help her with the sabudana sandige. She prepares it as winter trails away with the heaviness of Ajja breathing in measures. The plastic sheet is laid with four stones at every corner, indicating that it is always easy to control things that don’t really matter. Suddenly, the air is filled with the pungent odour of green chillies, (overused) to add some life to the otherwise ordinariness of sabudana, reminding me of Kaka’s life—four daughters in a house full of chores. I scoop a spoon full of the mixture, a transparent jelly with Bolshevik objectives, unheeding. I carefully place it on spots marked by Kaku that appear like hatched plans of sureness.
….
These need three days, she declares. Three days for them to go stiff as corpses and then suddenly spring to life at the touch of hot oil like blossoming lotuses at dawn. Such is the vagueness of existence. Kaku plans her kumbalakayi sandige while my mind stays transfixed on Peter Rabbit.
(Starchy memories are the toughest to wash away)
In a conversation with SamyuktaPoetry, Poornima revealed, “For me poetry is a means to question all that I fail to fight otherwise. It is my angst summed up. I write because that’s the only lens I have to capture the failures of the world. Failure specifically as it carries hurt and helplessness. I love writing about mundane and how extraordinary they are as experiences.
As much as structural peculiarities are concerned I write free verse and have now shifted to prose poetry as a form. I am also experimenting with forms to understand how they can create an impact on the written word.
I am inspired by Indian poets and folklore.”
Her chapbook Thirteen is a study in the ways relationships tinge our actions and make us choose our quests. Her poems are like archaeological sites that reveal a once bustling civilization. Between clusters of densely populated thoroughfares, one finds shards of relationships and shadows of afterthoughts. There is an unspoken challenge that she throws down when she asks uncomfortable questions, seeking to unlearn all that has been inked upon bodies and brains.
I am hanging the shadow On the clothesline; Clip it tight With the ones I purchased in the local plastic store For 45 rupees per dozen; Couldn’t negotiate more, So I had to let go; They say quality products come at a price, At times even women fail at cheap bargaining. (Shadows for keepsake)
Poornima’s relationships are taut- the easy banter, the roses and lilies and saccharine tones are absent and, in their place, one finds tart retorts and brooding revelations.
Smells take me back to people. Like Amma always smells of turmeric, Appa of teakwood furniture, P of fresh weed, and him, beef. No, I haven’t yet confessed that his odour repels me. It reminds me of slow meat cooking and the spices that run into my nostrils deeper than childhood memories. And so, every anniversary, I gift him cologne that contains sea-salt and the quiet secret of lemongrass. As for me, I smell of anti-depressants that blend like detergent in hard water.
(Apple cinnamon fragrance pouch)
Her vocal presentation, unsettling style, the presentation all serve to unseat the reader who reads these prose passages and finds they are poetry after all. Her works have that rare ability to stop you in your tracks with the force of the images they hand you.
From my window I see the orange circle Escape in a blue quilt Quietly without leaving any traces of its existence
(Melancholy)
Her writings resound with the tang and zest of the storyteller. She layers her narrative with intense imagery, places her characters and speaks directly and distinctly. Her allusions seem like statements due to the force with which they are delivered. I read her lines and ended up thinking about the people in my village- their lives, their grouses, their peeves and their triumphs and tragedies- as told by my mother and her mother before her. As much as Poornima is a poet, she is also a storyteller. And her art is that of the dastangoi.
She presents the dilemma of the millennial- the discomfort, the guilt of an entire generation who are coming to terms with the struggles of breaking their conditioning on one hand, and combating the swaggering sureness of the iGen on the other. This unlearning comes at a price- her voice seeks but doesn’t find a home anywhere. The restlessness is even more apparent when placed against the structured steadiness of the voices that respond to her questions with silence or stone walls.
Under the shade of the old peepul tree, you draw a square with boxes that behave, stay within boundaries like good girls of our Brahmin family. I choose four pieces of a broken glass bangle as my set to play with. I have to reach the centre. But isn’t that the goal of every game? Getting to the core to ask the futile question: Now what? So, I choose a different game. I flick the money cowries as high as I can. I catch them with the vigour that life possesses while holding the nerves on my neck until I go B L U E When I think I am done trying all the cowries, love comes crawling like an attention-seeking infant.
(Set of four cowries)
As I sit reflecting on the remarkable poetry of Poornima Laxmeshwar, I think of my own grandmother who carries histories in the lines of her palms. Who was once young and who then grew old while trying to get by, who loved in her own vocabulary and has never read a single line her whole life. Who can only guess her age and those of her children but knows the ages of the trees in her backyard. Who sat by and let a child have her fill of salted mangoes and ignored the hundred chores and a hungry family to patiently hold open the lid of the wicker basket and show the child how chickens hatch.
Ajji wore her nine yards meticulously. Her concern was to show not too much of her strong legs that knew the weight of the distance between one abortion and another. But it was gold that she dreamt of, more than bearing a baby boy. The big nathani was reserved for festivals. Every time she wore it, the weight of the emerald and gold pulled her nose down but her pride swelled like her womb did almost every year until the doctor warned her about fragile bones going hollow. ―16 times,‖ she said. I no longer liked the analogy of sweet sixteen. The last time I saw her, Ajji lied still with her toothless mouth open, dressed in a worn out nighty and a shawl. The nathani’s fate was undecided. Either it would adorn the village deity Mahamaya’s face or melt as easily as our ancestral history.
(The secret pocket in the petticoat)
I want to go find the gypsy with the gunny sack and ask him to return my afternoons and my grandmother.
I keep my spirit within my daily clothes, a certain poetry of moments.
(Jaydeep Sarangi)
While the pandemic rages on and seems to churn out chaos at will, there are worlds behind closed doors, glass facades, spaces of the mind where sinkholes have opened up. And the everyday has emerged from the depths to which it was relegated- as a blip in time, as a shrug in that never-ending chase after meaning and the philosophy of purpose. While the everyday has been around us ever since we can remember, it sometimes takes real effort to step out and seek it in our words, our actions and above all in our thoughts.
Today, when histories recount a series of mistakes and the future is bleak, the everyday is what we have left. And while each person’s everyday is distinct, and an experience in itself, what the pandemic has done is to force a reimagination. To make one take a long and hard look at these days that were congealing into one and devise ways and means to find markers that would hold their place in memory. This is when we realise, how the rush of routines manages to obscure the injuries we carry, the mirrors we refuse to look into and the anxieties we defer facing.
The pandemic has brought these to the surface as there is nowhere to go, nothing else to do or no one to visit- nothing that would take the edge off. While things are improving and contacts are being re-established, the almost virulent participation in social rituals and those ‘obligatory’ attendances have become optional or avoidable and, in some cases, one no longer gets invited even. The everyday is what we have left. In it lies the joys of discoveries. I suppose the infinite experiments in bread making that the pandemic spurred are a case in evidence and so are the innumerable Dalgona coffees that did the rounds.
Lines of people walked home, some made it, some did not and by that time, those that got home began travelling back because there was nothing much to look forward to. Lines of people crisscrossing each other like fate on palms and these everydays joined the vast rivers of time that people found they had. And just when they thought they knew everything there was to know about themselves, here was knowledge at its most intimate and personal. I sometimes think that it is the self that humans find most terrifying. The knowledge of what lies beneath veneers and lacquered surfaces can surprise one.
This is perhaps why, the Nobel Prize in Lietrature for 2020 went to the everydayness and intimate selves of Louise Glück. For “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”, as the citation reads. In these days of political and inclusive choices, when a white, heterosexual poet gets the Nobel, it makes one sit up and take notice. Glück’s poems are steeped in the conversations that wrap themselves around love- or the lack of it, the cold scent of danger that singes nostrils, the preoccupation around the casual violence that comes so very naturally to humans. Words are used sparingly, parsimoniously. But they are words that you and I regard almost everyday and possibly discard in favour of gilt-edged ones. Many have questioned the choice of Glück for the award, seeing as there may not be the sweeping grandeur of emotion or construction that one expects from a ‘Nobel’ prize winner. And therein lies her merit too. To speak of these febrile worlds and still letting them lurk in the shadows is exceptional poetry. There is no redemption. These worlds are free of the burden of enlightenment, of knowledge, of that supposedly beautiful light of salvation.
A Fantasy
I’ll tell you something: every day people are dying. And that’s just the beginning. Every day, in funeral homes, new widows are born, new orphans. They sit with their hands folded, trying to decide about this new life.
There are the interminable stretches of days that are indistinguishable from one another. What I noticed in her poems was the way time seems to be in limbo. The heat that emanates from the streets of back-of-beyond towns hangs over everything, making it all seem melted and malleable. `The ways families come in, Mother and Aunt, dubbed Spite and Malice- grief, grouses, ancient resentments, rites of passage…the grime and soot that lies heavy upon the memories of people and places is suffocatingly and acerbically put across.
Twilight
All day he works at his cousin’s mill, so when he gets home at night, he always sits at this one window, sees one time of day, twilight. There should be more time like this, to sit and dream. It’s as his cousin says: Living—living takes you away from sitting. …
I open my fingers— I let everything go.
Visual world, language, rustling of leaves in the night, smell of high grass, of woodsmoke.
I let it go, then I light the candle.
A talk about the birds and bees between and a mother and a daughter turns into this revelation about the father- an unwitting yet vital participant in the conversation- the foreshadowing of the ways things become- degenerate into.
At the River
School wasn’t in session. I went back to my room and shut the door and my mother went into the kitchen where my father was pouring glasses of wine for himself and his invisible guest who—surprise—doesn’t appear. No, it’s just my father and his friend the Holy Ghost partying the night away until the bottle runs out, after which my father continues sitting at the table with an open book in front of him. Tactfully, so as not to embarrass the Spirit, my father handled all the glasses, first his own, then the other, back and forth like every other night. …
When I got home, my mother was asleep, my father was still at the table, reading his book. And I said, Did your friend go away? And he looked at me intently for a while, then he said, Your mother and I used to drink a glass of wine together after dinner.
Possibly, how little we know about the people whom we think we have known all our life. Just a couple of days ago, I found a few books that belong to my mother- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Collected Works of Tom Paine and The Prince. Hardbound, cherished volumes. And I never imagined it of her. It made me want to bring the books over to my shelf. To tell myself that I own a part of that presence that is no longer visible. Or forgotten. To drink that cup of wine at an odd, odd hour. It is this connect that brings Glück into the conversation of the contemporary world. She sings the songs that we wished to keep for another day.
Speaking of songs brings us to our poet of the week, Jaydeep Sarangi, a poet of great renown, whose verse is beautiful on account of the elemental bond it shares with the everyday. The rivers, streams, plants, birds that in the march of civilisaton seem nothing more than white noise, in the lines of Sarangi transform into protagonists. His poems are populated by people who are waiting. Are contemplative. Worlds move at their own unhurried pace, like a river that carries a mountain dissolved. And the river has to be a witness, as Sarangi is often called the Bard on the banks of the Dulung, a river in Jhagram. Among his formative influences is the iconic Kanakdurga temple, the priests of which are from the Sarangi family.
From the Travel Diary
Some doors I visited bear truths of time, maps changing.
Rivers far and near know how I poured out my confessions. Today’s coffee is waiting With foam and fen, trains whistling.
In the blurb of Sarangi’s 2013 collection of poems, Silent Days, Keki N. Daruwalla says, ‘Jaydeep Sarangi gives a fresh paint to everyday living. “Small rivers” near tribal villages are his haunts. His language can be unorthodox, where a rock can turn into a “reckless flow”, but his poems are a rewarding read, with the scent of herbs coming through the pages.’ A river, a bard, coffee and love…
Love
All along the rainy earth a wild game of love is played at all our ears and eyes for a result that is never complete.
And if anyone still has doubts as to why our everydays matter, please read up on the great Idli debate on Twitter, where the humble idli, which up until now, was a rather uneventful steamed batter of rice and lentils is now the repository of South Indian pride. After all, literally, millions of idlis with companion dishes like chutneys and sambar are being consumed in South India at least on a daily basis. To have it being called boring by a white man no less- invited the wrath of people who if they hadn’t jumped into idli’s defence, would not have been able to look their sambar in the eye.
Nobel Prize, Idli, Nihilist mother, Jaydeep Sarangi do not come together everyday. Every day.
Sonya J. Nair Editor
Slippery Doors of History
History is absences from the present. There’s time when we walked pass them a pool of blood countless unnoticed acts are history not written. Text books, page after page killed unnamed kings leaders and martyrs far away from the metro lines by the magic rod of publicity. In a salt of sea, skeletons of ships carry mysteries. All parts quietly wait to be uncovered, skull after skull.
A Prayer House
I fall From miscalculations. I fear For roses. I articulate My hunger. I live With my cool bones.
I am Just here.Virtual Time oozes out In the rain forest. My voices go in and out I make the room for sleep.
I try again Arrange for my sleep. Sleepless night Rolls on my pillow I see A sharp blade of love. After the dream In a prayer house.
Someone is holding my wall
With you I first toured deep forests and ghats, my weather was you.
Today, I watch the last leaves falling hard against the ground. You suddenly stopped sitting with me speaking to them about a game.
Alone I sit. My walls fall apart. I remember a quiet kiss somewhere senses lapsed, only a bit of cold.
Growing Lonely
Now I stand barefoot Among these ruins of life With my diabetic bones Waiting for a full song From night birds. Social distancing My weariness, my aging shoulders Still wait for friends, good friends Who have become friends of others. I watch my doors After a spell of erratic rain. Always keep the keys ready.
A promise, a good harvest Then, too long a distance.
Relationship is always a fresh attire. I fear not arthritis, pain in the bones But this neglect from all these doors.
Berating, deep cool berating In my newly painted house.
Jaydeep Sarangi is a widely anthologized, bilingual poet with eight collections in English latest being Heart Raining the Light (2020 )released in Rome. Sarangi has read his poems in different parts of the globe. His later readings were at Flinders University, University of Western Australia, University of South Australia, University of Wollongong, Perth Poetry Club (Australia), University of Udine(Italy)and University of Rezeszow (Poland). Sarangi is on the editorial boards of different journals featuring poetry and articles on poetry like the Mascara Literary Review, Transnational Literature (Australia), Setu (USA), Geetanjali and Beyond (Scottland) Teesta, WEC (India). He has seven critical books on poetry and edited special issues on poetry for reputed journals in India and abroad. He is guest editing a special volume with Dr Amelia Walker for TEXT(Australia). Among his recent awards, the Setu Award of Excellence for 2019 (USA). He is a professor of English and Principal at New Alipore College, Kolkata.
There was a time when I thought it takes a lot to rob a person of their optimism. That there were oceans separating anger from cynicism. This week, I discovered I was wrong. Anger is just across a narrow road from cynicism. There is something in our world that has us pre-programmed either towards smugness or cynicism. That it has always been only a matter of time. It depends on what side of history you live on. One of the most profound moments of heart aching optimism I witnessed all around the world was when Obama was sworn in as President for the first time. And they handed him the Nobel Prize for Peace only nine months later for SAYING he would shut down Guantanamo Bay. That year, in a personality contest held in a college, a judge asked a contestant if Obama deserved the Prize and she said “yes”. That’s all. The judges applauded; the audience applauded. The kid won the crown. Guantanamo Bay still stands. Words words words.
The fact that words have no meaning or have only arbitrary meanings was proved yet again when this week, after twenty eight years of witness accounts, television footage, photographs, notes from the diaries of journalists, the accused themselves at one point or the other boasting of their accomplishments, reports running into thousands of pages, the Babri Masjid was found to have collapsed on its own. Figuratively. Well…because ‘literally’ has lost its meaning. To say it just came down suddenly- in a matter of five hours suggests that a lot of people taking their morning constitutional saw this structure, realised it did not belong there and scrambled up, found demolition- capable tools lying around and set to work, scientifically and systematically. If only this unison and clarity of thought went into planning our towns, our healthcare, our schools, our utilities, our systems of social justice- we could well be living in a parallel universe.
Speaking of social justice, there was a programme announced with great fanfare- Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao- Save the Daughter; Educate the Daughter. It is meant to address the skewed sex ratio, encourage literacy among women etc. I read a post on Facebook where someone opined that now, rather than being the name of a welfare scheme, Beti Bachao sounds more like a warning. Looking at the incidents in Hathras over the last few days, one is inclined to agree. Manisha is dragged away into the fields and assaulted, her tongue mangled, spine broken- and she dies in hospital after giving a statement on video where she says she was raped. There had been a previous attempt to assault her that she had escaped. Her mortal remains were brought to her village in the early hours of the morning and cremated by the police on a hastily assembled pyre. She was not allowed to be brought home one last time. And the village resembles a garrison. No one is allowed in. The opposition is roughed up when they try to go in and meet the family. The press is categorically and implacably stonewalled.
The government has gone into damage control mode, hired a PR agency and made the father of the girl sign statements that he is happy with the investigations. A few police officers have been suspended. But those who follow the news will recall a certain police officer with a henna- dyed beard who was charged with a cold encounter killing in the state where Gandhi hails from. He has been promoted in February 2020- six years after his retirement. Thankyou very much. I remember reading about times when public figures assumed moral responsibility and resigned. Now they hire PR firms. The caste of the raped girl is important. Very important- because it informs the impunity of the crime. But such is the conundrum that I don’t know if the caste should qualify Manisha. That she was raped stands above it all. It is like a Rorschach test for the mind. Only, the patterns are not random. They are systemic and smug.
The post mortem report states that there had been no rape. Must be because the body is now a handful of ash and there is no way to confirm or deny. And because those who made the report do not understand the meaning of rape. And since the post mortem report says so, there was no rape.
And slightly before all this, there was a judge on a superbike who was tweeted about by a lawyer. The lawyer was suo motto charged with contempt and asked to tender an apology. There was an interesting train of thought that ensued in the courtroom where he was told there is nothing wrong in tendering an apology…that it is not a sin…that one enters the league of Mahatma Gandhi when one apologises…and by this statement- asking a man who does not mean the apology to anyway just apologise, the powers that be rob the word of any meaning. Smug power that appropriates all that it fancies.
No demolition, No rape. No apology. No words.
Cynic though I may be, I realise that those with something to hide are actually afraid of words. Of the revelatory power of words. At their permanence. Of their power to bear witness. That’s why Sanjiv Bhatt went to prison for 30 years and R K Raghavan went to Cyprus as High Commissioner. It about how they each used their words. And named names. Or forgot to.
This is the reason our poet of this week is so special. There is a flame lit underneath her cauldron of words and she stirs them to dole out portions of molten angst. She names things. Calls them out, contests them. Talks about anger, subjugation and the need to be free. Her liberty is not one that comes from the sweetness of a docile apology. It is one that looks people in the eye as it walks out of the door slamming it with a resounding bang. Katyayani is one of the best-known names in Hindi poetry.
Let’s do this
Let’s do this Let’s conspire- lay tunnels of gunpowder and blow up the world of silence
(Translation mine)
These silences come in many forms and take a heavy toll. Katyayani hails from Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, India. She has been widely anthologized as well as been translated into English and Russian. She is featured in Penguin’s Their Own Voice. She has four collections of poetry to her name - Saat Bhaiyon Ke Beech Champa, Is Pourushpoorna Samay Mein, Chehron Ppar Aanch and Jadoo Nahin Kavita.
Her intense words reflect the violence inflicted on personhood and subjectivities and the extent to which society relentlessly ‘worries’ about women-
To have no body
One day a woman ceases to be a body and topsy- turvy turns the whole world suddenly!
She believes that a true poet must be an activist. A good poet must understand and write of that which ails the world. The work must be political. For her, the real problem that haunts us stems from capitalist greed and policies. The fear of minorities, xenophobia, social tensions all come from neo-colonial power structures. And this power is not dependent on political might. The conversations initiated by liberal thought are ill- prepared to combat it. She urges the working classes to realise their strength and to rise. It is a call to the many Lefts to mobilise and congregate. The Left for Katyayani means anyone who is willing to stand out of power structures. The political Left in India, she feels, is merely a constitutional one- one that fights elections and thus obliquely supports the neo colonial agenda by adhering to prescribed structures. The sense of purpose and resistance that pervades her poetry is subtle and yet resounding.
My personal favourite among the twenty odd poems that I have read of Katyayani’s is Saat Bhayiyon Ke Beech Champa (Champa amidst seven brothers). The poem addresses, loudly and clearly, how a woman is perceived by the family and by society. How she is at times found drowned in a river, sometimes found hanging from the ceiling, or is charred to ash and how she comes back- each time, every time. The poem is powerful, symbolic and true. It is true. Dissent comes back and looks oppression in the eye, buildings collapse and the rubble settles in lungs, women grow their tongues and their spines back.
Words like Katyayani’s could well be the ones to wipe the smirk off smug faces. There it is again. That word. Smug. It has been haunting me all week. I say to myself, Words words words.
I have been wondering about the nature of memory. Why do we remember things? And most importantly…how do we remember them? In this process of remembering and re-remembering, is also embedded, the art of forgetting. I have found that people hate being forgotten. And then, there is the huge problem of selective memory, which is the tendency to remember only those bits and pieces of incidents, that suit you the most. Meaning, Post-truth is a much older phenomenon than we thought. There is nothing as frightening as the certainty of belief that comes from a memory- those passionate declarations that begin with, “I remember a time when…” .
The rates at which images shift around in our heads makes it difficult for memories to stay. Or be recalled. Life moves at such a frightening pace that things, people and places coagulate into surrealist images. And the presence of intuitive media doesn’t help either. Social media sends in these memories at regular intervals reminding you of a particular time when a certain photograph was taken or a place was visited. Sometimes, these exercises in memory retrieval can be ironic because, the image sent to you is precisely the memory you wished to forget. So the question is, is memory a comfort zone, where lost things are lost for a reason and what you see is a garden of the pleasures and grouses and injuries you wish to hold on to, while somewhere in your mind is a landfill where is dumped the things too panful or inconvenient to think about? I would like to think so.
So, is there something called an honest memoryscape? One that plays those movies where you have the villain? That shows you a mirror of your horrors and mistakes? That’s a question you must ask yourself. Memories build palaces of illusions where the backdrop changes from time to time. Sometimes the participants in the same memory remember things differently. What do we do then? I still have a running dispute with a friend over whether we watched a certain movie together or by ourselves. And I can remember being in her house, the furniture and the weather outside while we watched it. Yet, we haven’t reached a resolution.
The trigger for these ruminations on memory is a blog, alakananda.wordpress.com authored by Remitha Sateesh. The contents of this blog are mostly memories of tastes, smells, sights and cultures. She also writes of her native place, Nagercoil, which is located in the southern part of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. A part of my childhood was spent in a place quite close to Nagercoil and my mother went to college there. So I have a special fondness for the place. Nagercoil means Temple of the Snake Gods. The temple of the snake gods is an ancient one and is visited by devotees and those who wish to remove baleful influences from their horoscopes- or seek relief from woes of a specific nature. Faith is a very important part of worshipping snakes. The rituals and systems of snake worship do not leave any place for ambiguity or doubt and possibly because snakes are very real, as opposed to other gods who are out of the line of sight of ordinary mortals, the belief in them is very strong. At Nagercoil, there are many rituals and customs one can offer as expiation. I remember, people offering little figurines of snakes or replicas of snake eggs wrapped in gold to propitiate the snake deities. One could also offer turmeric and milk for lesser sins or grievances.
On my way to the temple, as a child, I remember, occupying one of the front seats of the bus. My grandfather was sitting next to me. And I remember, him telling me that when the temple was part of the Travancore time in pre-Independent India, the King of Travancore, Marthanda Varma, who was cured of skin ailments after praying there, wanted to renovate the temple. Apparently, the snake god appeared in his dream and told the King that he wants the sanctum- sanctorum to remain thatched as that was how the temple had always been, for hundreds of years.
I still wonder if it all was really a dream where the snake god manifested or the King’s mind telling him to let at least some things remain the way they were. Guess, we will never know. I don’t think the King himself knew. And now, we have a nearly 2000-year old temple, with a roof of thatch and around which modernity continues its march.
I read Remitha Satheesh’s blog posts and see her sharp memory, the delight and the nostalgia that serve to make her writing so refreshing and genuine. She creates these streets, snacks, people through her posts and we are left wanting more.
This is what I find appealing in her poetry too. The strong strand of memory that runs through them. Some deliberate, some inadvertent. The reluctance to come unstuck from the past gives her poems a vintage feel. And when the present is a constant spool of ever-changing witness statements, rescinded narratives, issues that unfold on prime-time news and have the lifespan of a cereus, memories might be the thing we need to remember that we had a lived reality. That these memories are grounded in a life we once lived. In these distanced times, remembrances of a snake-god under a thatched roof could just be what we need to feel normal!
