Category: Writings Page 2 of 4

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.

In the end, what is time if not a promise?

Sonya J. Nair
Editor

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.

(Voyage of the Ambien Eater)

…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.

(Earth at Apogee) https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2020/09/earth-apogee-curbed/

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.

(Curbed) https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2020/09/earth-apogee-curbed/

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.

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.

(To inhabit my name)

https://poetryzinemag.wixsite.com/poetryzine/post/ricardo-plata-to-inhabit-my-name-and-other-poems

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.

The pot was fished out when the waters receded.

Sonya J. Nair
Editor

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.

Sonya J. Nair
Editor

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.

#LouiseGlück #Nobel2020 #JaydeepSarangi #Everyday #Machiavelli #Dulung #idli