Shadows, a poem in Korean, has been translated by the poet himself, Ihlwha Choi. Click hereto read.
Pranor Lifeby Tagore has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click hereto read.
Conversations
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri converses withVinta Nanda about the Shout, a documentary by Vinta Nanda that documents the position of women in Indian society against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement and centuries of oppression and injustice. Click here to read.
Perhaps, most sceptics will say it is against human nature to stop fighting and fanning differences. The first recorded war was fought more than 13,000 years ago in what is now a desert but was green long ago. Nature changed its face. Continents altered over time. And now again, we are faced with strange shifts in climate that could redefine not just the dimensions of the surface area available to humankind but also our very physical existence. Can we absorb these changes as a species when we cannot change our nature to self-destruct for concepts that with a little redefining could move towards a world without wars leading to famines, starvation, destruction of beautiful edifices of nature and those built by humankind? That we could feed all of humans — a theory that won economist Abhijit Banerjee his Nobel Prize in 2019 so coveted by all humanity — almost seems to have taken a backseat. This confuses — as lemmings self-destruct…do humans too? I would have thought that all humanity would have moved towards resolving hunger and facing the climate crises post-2019 and post-pandemic, instead of killing each other for retaining constructs created by powerbrokers.
In the timeless lyrics of ‘Imagine’, John Lennon found peace by suggesting we do away with manmade constructs which breed war, anger and divisions and share the world as one. Wilfred Owen and many writers involved in the World Wars wrote to showcase the desolation and the heartfelt darkness that is brought on by such acts. Nazrul also created a story based on his experience in the First World War, ‘Hena’, translated for us by Sohana Manzoor. Showcasing the downside of another kind of conflict, a struggle to survive, is a story with a distinctive and yet light touch from S Ramakrishnan translated from Tamil by B Chandramouli. And yet in a conflict-ridden world, humans still yearn to survive, as is evident from Tagore’s poem Pran or ‘Life’. Reflecting it is the conditioning that we go through from our birth that makes us act as we do are translations by Professor Fakrul Alam of Masud Khan’s poetry and from Korean by Ihlwha Choi.
A figure who questioned his own conditioning and founded a new path towards survival; propounded living by need, and not greed; renounced violence and founded a creed that has survived more than 2500 years, is the man who rose to be the Buddha. Born as Prince Siddhartha, he redefined the norms with messages of love and peace. Reiterating the story of this legendary human is debutante author, Advait Kottary with his compelling Siddhartha:The Boy Who Became the Buddha, a book that has been featured in our excerpts too. In an interview, Kottary tells us more of what went into the making of the book which perhaps is the best survivor’s guide for humanity — not that we need to all become Buddhas but more that we need to relook at our own beliefs, choices and ways of life.
Another thinker-cum-film maker interviewed in this edition is Vinta Nanda for her film Shout, which highlights and seeks resolutions for another kind of crisis faced by one half of the world population today. She has been interviewed and her documentary reviewed by Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri has also given us an essay on a bookshop called Kunzum which continues to expand and go against the belief we have of shrinking hardcopy markets.
Gastronomical adventures seem to be another concurrent theme in this edition. Rhys Hughes has written of the Indian sweets with gulab jamun as the ultimate life saver from Yetis while trekking in the Himalayas! A musing on lemon pickle by Raka Banerjee and Ravi Shankar’s quest for the ultimate dosaaround the world — from India, to Malaysia, to Aruba, Nepal and more… tickle our palate and make us wonder at the role of food in our lives as does the story about biryani battles by Anagaha Narasimha.
Talk of war, perhaps, conjures up gastronomic dreams as often scarcity of food and resources, even potable water and electricity is a reality of war or conflict. Michael Burch brings to us poignant poetry about war as Ramesh Karthik Nayak has a poem on a weapon used in wars. Ryan Quinn Flanagan has brought another kind of ongoing conflict to our focus with his poetry centring on the National Day (May 5th) in Canada for Vigils for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women by hanging red clothes from trees, an issue that perhaps has echoes of Vinta Nanda’s Shout and Suzanne Kamata’s poetry for her friend who went missing decades ago as opposed to Rachel Jayen’s defiant poetry where she asserts her womanhood. Ron Pickett, George Freek and Sayantan Sur have given us introspective perspectives in verse. We have more poetry asking for a relook at societal norms with tongue-in -cheek humour by Jason Ryberg and of course, Rhys Hughes with his heartfelt poem on raiders in deserts.
The piece that really brought a smile to the lips this time was Farouk Gulsara’s ‘Humbled by a Pig’, a humorous recount of man’s struggles with nature after he has disrupted it. Keith Lyons has taken a look at the concept of bucket lists, another strange construct, in a light vein. Devraj Singh Kalsi has given a poignant and empathetic piece about trees with a self-reflective and ironic twist. We have narratives from around the world with Suzanne Kamata taking us to Osaka Comic Convention, Meredith Stephens to Sierra Nevada and Shivani Shrivastav to Ladakh. Paul Mirabile has travelled to the subterranean world with his fiction, in the footsteps perhaps of Jules Verne but not quite.
We are grateful to all our wonderful contributors some of whom have not been mentioned here but their works were selected because they truly enriched our June edition. Do visit our contents page to meet and greet all our wonderful authors. I would like to thank the team at Borderless without whose efforts and encouragement our journal would not exist and Sohana Manzoor especially for her fantastic artwork as well. Thank you all.
Wish you another lovely month of interesting reads!
There are many places that poetry comes from — desire, death, dream, memory, sharp sensuous apprehension, the wrist-grip of language’s freedom and magic, the joys and fractures of the world that we engage in everyday, the necessity to commit to paper (or to posterity) what weighs upon the heart or head, the existential imperative to express, or the naïve hope of making the world a better place.
In general, the act of poetic creation draws its sap simultaneously from several of these sources. Many a time, however, one of these inspirations is bound to tower over all the rest. In the case of Prerna Gill’s Meanwhile (HarperCollins, 2023), the mysterious seduction of words combined with an urge to dress the world in impenetrable veils of meaning by conscientiously shuffling the charted signifiers and signifieds of language, seem to offer the veritable will-to-poetry.
One is drawn to the studied casualness of the title which, with its quiet, meditated understatement, purports poetry to be a by-the-way affair, a random afterthought. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the title as well as in the book as a whole, there is a skilled juxtaposition of two contiguous temporal frames — the physical and the psychic. The physical frame is the one in which the seemingly significant events of life take place. The psychic frame constitutes the ‘meanwhile’ of poetry.
This ‘meanwhile’ is not to be treated lightly for it is in these pockets of found time that the actual business of confronting the self for survival takes place. Here is a drawn-out negotiation with history, experience, emotions, pain, and trauma, and a poignant reconciliation with each of them. The psychological explorations of the ‘meanwhile’ in this collection are all-absorbing and have the potency to completely obstruct, offset and vanquish the eventful flow of physical time — “it’s always hungry in here” (‘An Hour Stays’). Nevertheless, this is not allowed to happen and both frames persist together, their density often overlapping.
If one pays sufficient aural attention, there is to be heard a silent ticking within Prerna’s poems, a tense balance between the physical or material and the psychic or mental, that threatens at any moment to collapse – “I sink through deep green waters/ To a cement floor buried/ Under boxes, old chairs, a pantheon in a funk” (‘Visit’). The fifty-nine poems in Meanwhile, then, manifest themselves as an acknowledgement of this essential fragility of time, balance, and life — a realisation that if the mind’s playhouse is affected or darkened, the lights in life’s theatre will inevitably be extinguished.
In the author’s words, the book is “an attempt to understand the less-than-shiny things that I can’t quite ignore any longer. The everyday things. The things that let the shadows in.” The paradoxical nature of time, emotional spontaneity and polyphony, the weaving/unweaving of the self, its fragile alignment/dealignment with the world, and the conglomeration of being constitute the thematic canvas of these poems. The cover image of a huge butterfly replacing the forehead and eyes of a human (woman’s) face looms to significance here. The symbolic suggestion of an alternative (inward or non-human) vision is hard to rule out (for animals occupy an enviable space in many poems of this collection) even as one is brought to mind of the butterfly effect of causation that operates, perhaps, most relentlessly in the headspace.
The acuteness of experience, the intensity of its processing, and its configuration through terse but often abrupt and abstruse images constitute the three essential prismatic walls of Meanwhile. Here is a carefully constructed theatre of the mind where lights and sounds radically transform in meaning through connotative and symbolic suggestions. In much of Prerna’s poetry is a semantic and narrative inscrutability that seems to operate as conscious poetic strategy. In the noumenon of these poems is both illumination and construction. Language is both torch and subterfuge, revelation and concealment, statement and retraction so that travelling through these poems is to traverse an experiential space that is deliberately half-lit.
In ‘Unmasked’, the poet writes:
Glaucous moon shivering inches of glass
She cuts her shape, cuts at it in echo
Grows it asking after her sons and rent
The possibility of rain and grandchildren
And if they glimpsed her first body
In birthmark, headline, running stitch
Here, as in many of her pieces, the real and the surreal walk together, undistinguished. In ‘Chedipe’, for instance – “Never could tell if she first saw him/ From behind green bottles or tall grass” – the atmosphere often turns disturbing and sometimes, singularly acherontic. In ‘Tributary’, the witnessing of the phenomenon of death opens a startling avenue of perception:
Until his splintering close enough to see
How easily a tributary is made:
A young man slipping from the course of the day
His hours held close as cards
In these poems’ handling of the self as subject, one finds little narcissism. The mind that is sculpted by particularity of experience, memory and upheaval of feeling is, to be sure, intensely subjective and yet, the distillation of these experiences in poetry makes way for a rich reading. What animates these poems and renders them more than abstract musings of an idiosyncratic mind is their keen and devout understanding of life’s complexity, its essential sense of injustice, and its brief but significant redemptions – “days pressed to currants between/ Pages folded for the edge of winter/And winters still” (‘Ant, Grasshopper’) or “Things of a hard blue sky yearn/ For the only light they do not share” (‘Before This Summer’) The use of short, clipped, often dramatic sentences; the frequent avoidance of punctuation; a polished, urban vocabulary; and an essential belief in the lability of time chisel these poems into pieces reflective of a deeper and highly nuanced reality of the mind as of the world.
The collection has several memorable poems. ‘Bucketsful’, for instance, brilliantly conjures childhood memory, loss, diminishing, and incommunicability through the bulbous image of frogs “Leaping to the rim/ Like it knew a boiling hurry” and ends with words that “balloon my throat and the only ones who would understand them/ Have long skipped town”. In ‘Trees’, the “verdant announcements” of foliage are capable of sustaining life despite its monotony – “Allergies, dry cleaning, soup” so that “in one glance/ The world becomes/ Leaves”. ‘Autopsy’ builds itself around a single cinematic image – “The naked bulb above the table/ Flickered too much” and as a verb, can symbolically extend itself from a person to a situation to life itself. ‘The Dollmaker’, one of those poems that makes the act of reading this collection inseparable from the recognition of the author’s experiences as a woman in the world, skilfully builds up the automated rhythms of a woman’s being in a sexist universe.
Meanwhile, thus, offers a whole new world for our absorption, intriguing in its opacity, and plumbing a depth that is accessible only to those who are prepared to lose themselves in the sharp silhouettes of its images. Here is the gradual but steady eclipsing of material geography to throw light upon the imperialism of the psyche and in this, there is a fine and fluid celluloid effect at work. On the wide screen of language, Prerna’s images travel with a terse celluloid confidence – aware, both, of being and non-being, of leading the reader through a range of signification that can never be pinned down to conclusion, of living a lie and yet upholding the truth.
As a debut collection of poems, Meanwhile stands out for its innovative experimentation with language which borders, often, on the existential, as if sanity and survival depended upon these elaborate linguistic disguises — the trickery of words, the enticement as well as the connotative distance of images, and the impossibility of locating a referential kernel to crack. In the measured pace of Prerna’s poems is a chromatic adventure that navigates the complex terrain of human emotions via a symbolism of shape, feeling and colour illuminating the little-known multiverse of the subconscious – “Square fingers running a pen/ Over prescription or continent” (‘Maps’) or “You, with nights under your fingernails/ Tell no one how it happened” (‘Black’).
In the excavated or found space of ‘meanwhile’ flows a continuous and consistent dialogue between the various selves – the past and the present, the mentor and the mentee, the seeing and the knowing, the forgetful and the cautious, and so on and so forth. When this space transforms itself into the intersubjective bond of poetry it becomes therapeutic, healing both the speaker and the listener from a pain that is deeply shared as inhabitants of a difficult world — “Some mornings I think of a rabbit with orchid ears/ The stray toms left her in a pit in my stomach/ Filled with lettuce and sweet straw (‘Keeping’) or “In this way, we are brittle femur/ And like this, we are sky” (‘White’).
The world will, perhaps, continue to be what it is. Meanwhile, here is a book that promises to be a friend.
Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
ProfessorFakrul Alam brings to us Tagore songs in translation and in discussion on the season that follows the scorching heat of summer months. Clickhereto read.
“May is pretty, May is mild,
Dances like a happy child…”
Annette Wynne (Early twentieth century)
Each month is expressed in a different form by nature in various parts of the world. In the tropics, May is sweltering and hot — peak summer. In the Southern hemisphere, it is cold. However, with climate change setting in, the patterns are changing, and the temperatures are swinging to extremes. Sometimes, one wonders if this is a reflection of human minds, which seem to swing like pendulums to create dissensions and conflicts in the current world. Nothing seems constant and the winds of change have taken on a menacing appearance. If we go by Nazrul’s outlook, destruction is a part of creating a new way of life as he contends in his poem, ‘Ring Bells of Victory’ — “Why fear destruction? It’s the gateway to creation!” Is this how we will move towards ‘dancing like a happy child’?
Mitra Phukan addresses this need for change in her novel, What Will People Say — not with intensity of Nazrul nor in poetry but with a light feathery wand, more in the tradition of Jane Austen. Her narrative reflects on change at various levels to explore the destruction of old customs giving way to new that are more accepting and kinder to inclusivity, addressing issues like widow remarriage in conservative Hindu frameworks, female fellowship and ageing as Phukan tells us in her interview. Upcoming voice, Prerna Gill, lauded by names like Arundhathi Subramaniam and Chitra Divakaruni, has also been in conversation with Shantanu Ray Choudhuri on her book of verses, Meanwhile. She has refreshing perspectives on life and literature.
Devraj Singh Kalsi has written a nostalgic piece that hovers between irony and perhaps, a reformatory urge… I am not quite sure, but it is as enjoyable and compelling as Meredith Stephen’s narrative on her conservation efforts in Kangaroo Island in the Southern hemisphere and fantastic animals she meets, livened further by her photography. Ravi Shankar talks of his night hikes in the Northern hemisphere, more accurately, in the Himalayas. While trekking at night seems a risky task, trying to recreate dishes from the past is no less daunting, as Suzanne Kamata tells us in her Notes from Japan.
May hosts the birthday of a number of greats, including Tagore and Satyajit Ray. Ratnottama Sengupta’s piece on Ray’s birth anniversary celebrations with actress Jaya Bachchan recounting her experience while working for Ray in Mahanagar(Big City), a film that has been restored and was part of celebrations for the filmmaker’s 102nd Birth anniversary captures the nostalgia of a famous actress on the greatest filmmakers of our times. She has also given us an essay on Tagore and cinema in memory of the great soul, who was just sixty years older to Ray and impacted the filmmaker too. Ray had a year-long sojourn in Santiniketan during his youth.
Eulogising Rabindrasangeet and its lyrics is an essay by Professor Fakrul Alam on Tagore. Professor Alam has translated number of his songs for the essay as he has, a powerful poem from Bengali by Masud Khan. A transcreation of Tagore’s first birthday poem , a wonderful translation of Balochi poetry by Fazal Baloch of Munir Momin’s verses, another one from Korean by Ihlwha Choi rounds up the translated poetry in this edition. Stories that reach out with their poignant telling include Nadir Ali’s narrative, translated from Punjabi by his daughter, Amna Ali, and Aruna Chakravarti’s translation of a short story by Tagore. We have more stories from around the world with Julian Gallo exploring addiction, Abdullah Rayhan with a poignant narrative from Bangladesh, Sreelekha Chatterjee with a short funny tale and Paul Mirabile exploring the supernatural and horror, a sequel to ‘The Book Hunter‘, published in the April issue.
All the genres we host seem to be topped with a sprinkling of pieces on Tagore as this is his birth month. A book excerpt from Chakravarti’s Daughters of Jorasankonarrates her well-researched version of Tagore’s last birthday celebration and carries her translation of the last birthday song by the giant of Bengali literature. The other book excerpt is from Bhubaneswar@75 – Perspectives, edited by Bhaskar Parichha/ Charudutta Panigrahi. Parichha has also reviewed Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life: From India to Canadaby Ujjal Dosanjh, a book that starts in pre-independent India and travels with the writer to Canada via UK. Again to commemorate the maestro’s birth anniversary, Meenakshi Malhotra has revisited Radha Chakravarty’s translation of Tagore’s Farewell Song. Somdatta Mandal has critiqued KR Meera’sJezebel, translated from Malayalam by Abhirami Girija Sriram and K. S. Bijukuma. Lakshmi Kannan has introduced to us Jaydeep Sarangi’s collection of poems, letters in lower case.
There are pieces that still reach out to be mentioned. Do visit our content page for May. I would like to thank Sohana Manzoor for her fantastic artwork and continued editorial support for the Tagore translations and the whole team for helping me put together this issue. Thank you. A huge thanks to our loyal readers and contributors who continue to bring in vibrant content, photography and artwork. Without you all, we would not be where we are today.
A discussion on Prerna Gill’s new book of poems, Meanwhile, published by HarperCollins India
In a social media world teeming with every banality that goes for poetry, Prerna Gill’s is a refreshing voice that does not pander to easy rhetoric and comprehension. If good poetry is all about the silences between words, the spaces between the lines, Meanwhile is a collection that lives up to the test. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri spoke to the poet on her first collection of poems.
Your author’s note starts off almost defensive about ‘putting the book out’. It also provides a glimpse of what poetry means to you: ‘…when the guests leave … room is far too still’. Why do you call it narcissistic, and why poetry? Does it help cope with whatever it is that you seek?
Writing is a way through which I examine how I may still be compromised – by fears, by a stillness that some may call the blues, others ennui or even laziness. I think this form of introspection also helps me see how and where I have healed from issues I struggle with, like anxiety. It is therapeutic, almost, and points to how I may show myself grace and where I have some work to do. When poetry does so much for me it almost feels selfish, as though I put the reader second – which is, of course, not by design. I write what I know, but even this indulgence in examining my own psyche through wordcraft does seem terribly narcissistic, like I can’t stop staring into my own shadow. Not all of my poems are about this, but enough of them to make me a little uncomfortable when I do think about it.
When was it that you first realised the urge to write … and was it poetry or the dark mythology which I know is another passion? Do you remember your first attempt at a poem?
The first poem I wrote was in middle school and was about a bat. Animals are so fascinating, but there was always something about bats. I think they are adorable, really, and in no way deserving of their terrible reputation. As for the darker things that crept in later beginning with gothic novels, I loved the atmosphere, and how it was never too cheerful – this made me comfortable because, at the time I got into it, I was not in the sunniest of places in terms of my own headspace. Even now, when I feel much better and more balanced, it is my favourite genre along with horror and dark fantasy. It is quite an obsession, and has led to a supernatural-themed doll collection and a library of cherished horror computer games. At work, this manifests as a publishing list with many horror novels. I want to publish all the ghost stories and books on dark folklore and myths that I can get away with. It’s going quite well.
Do you read a lot of poetry? Are there any particular favourites who inspire you, or influence your poetry?
I read quite a bit, but probably still not as much as I should. I enjoy Anne Carson’s work, also Ella Frears. Currently I am reading Orexia: Poems by Lisa Russ Spaar. Of the older poets, my favourite is Sylvia Plath for how eloquently she captures small moments of violence. Also her free verse – which I enjoy because, in my opinion, it puts the words first and everything follows – like red chasing the scalpel.
Can you talk about the process – the birth of a poem. And whether you rework/rewrite or come upon the poem in one draft, ready… You can talk about, say, (i) ‘come teatime she will inherit the ice’ (On Not Drowning) … how does that line form, where does it begin, and (ii) ‘we will loosen our consonants’ (No Strings) … where does that line originate, and become a part of the poem?
A poem can begin with a name, a random word or thought. I can dwell on a poem for months and then delete the whole damned thing. Other times, I can return to a piece of verse and tinker it into a new animal. The rule I set for myself is to put all my finished poems in one folder and return to them in a different season, a different mood, and see if they still say something – even if it isn’t what I wanted them to. So many are erased, but the ones I like I keep in a new folder, ready to submit wherever I think they may have a chance.
About the line to do with inheriting ice: This is from a ‘Persona’ poem with bits of my own experiences with dissociating in difficult times – something that will eventually be harmful, in that you avoid confronting it. At the same time, the best way to look at something in the dark may be to look beside it – not at it. I am not a psychiatrist, but it is a poem about a coping mechanism, one I was once too familiar with. That said, I wanted to look at the hereditary nature of things like anxiety. I have, in my later teenage years, struggled with moments where I felt I could not move or feel. Like I was numbed by ice. I do not know where that came from, but the persona from the poem does know. Her mother and sister are mentioned at the end of the poem, pulling her out of the underwater world she creates as she drowns. Or rather, doesn’t. The choice of ‘teatime’ was to anchor this moment to a very domestic space with a certain pressure to be social and civil – a difficult moment in which to find yourself frozen in a way handed down by those sipping at their cups around you. I could only imagine what that is like and then it became this poem.
The second line you mention is from a poem that goes in the opposite direction, exploring a moment of fleeting intimacy. It is a line where caution slackens, and where sewing and strings and threads form a lot of the imagery … this lets language come into the picture of a quick moment. We have more consonants than vowels. They form so much of what we say, a lot of which may be sharper and faster moving, not rounded gently by ‘an’ like the apple it may precede. They are brisque, taut strings played more often. To me, they represent the more common things we discuss. Small talk. When looking into this moment in the poem, a one-night stand, the loosening is framed as a deliberate act to serve a purpose. It is affection implemented with steely resolve.
You have six poems on colours – and the author’s note also says ‘there’s no looking past the greys…’ What is it about colour that it plays through your poems.
The grey in the introduction was mostly to highlight the everyday moments compared to the more dramatic milestones. With the poems, I get to explore colour in a slightly different way.
Red: ‘and plain on every face … some of us are grey by twenty-five years’. Red is the first colour to fade from view under water, and that struck me as quite poetic all by itself. The deeper some of us get in our lives, in terms of time and age, or the deeper we sink into our troubles, I find we are at a greater risk of losing what red comes to mean. In terms of my own mental health, I saw red as the opposite end of a spectrum from the odd forms of silence that I would be overcome by: a silence of regular, reasonable thought that would normally counter exaggerated fears. There were also silences of action and movement with a very strange inability to will myself to get up from wherever I had perched at times during the difficult phases. In those times, I would think of red having gone from me. Once I got better, I could put those images into words.
‘Red loses the deeper it goes
And here the kelp and pale coral
Here silence’
Green (Was struck by the contrast … mother’s rage, green, closing day green): ‘The colour of a closing day …The colour of one mother’s rage’. I do see the connection it has with nature. I also see how nature and a certain vicious protectiveness, especially that which is expressed in a paranoid postpartum state, are inseparable. Motherhood is natural, it is dangerous. The image of the snake on her nest and the way ‘her heart spreads its hood’ comes from a very personal encounter with that sort of anger –which one can do nothing about because it is locked and loaded in case of danger to one’s child. It is a primordial thing. I was very prepared for postpartum depression, so a state of constant, protective anger took me by surprise. It never fully slithered away though. Or rather, it hasn’t yet.
Blue: ‘seas no longer churning wine-dark … Spring draped flat over March … above all memory of the womb’. For ‘Blue’ I could not look past its role in culture, specifically gender. Also, how its symbolism has changed. Some cultures may never have categorised it as a colour and that is so fascinating as an example of how words have such power even over what we see so much of. When Homer described the sea as ‘wine dark’ it was understood to mean blue. It did confuse people for quite some time, that description. This is one of the theories, of course, but it stayed with me: that blue became part of certain languages much later. The poem then explores the link between blue and boyhood. Once, pink was a masculine colour. I suppose people saw that rosy shade as too visceral for young boys then, perhaps too close to the violence that comes just before the guests flood in to coo at a newborn. When you think of the sky and the open ocean it may be easier to forget the nature of birth and blood. Such a stark contrast to life and life-giving. To womanhood.
Yellow: ‘we live between forests … cage small birds in our mouths…’ The poem ‘Yellow’ started out with a different placeholder name: Canary. That’s why the mention of the bird for safety as we go digging deep into the rock for what our predecessors set in stone. The past comes with dangerous problems just waiting to be inherited. The image of having canaries in our mouths was to lay emphasis on how our words, our voices may be all that we have to signal danger when we find ourselves so deep in problems created by evils of the past.
Black: ‘…to a world so tepid green, the fireflies sail white … nothing is as still as you…’ The poem ‘Black’ on the other hand has more to do with very current problems, such as psychological ones, but also others – I wanted that part open to interpretation. What is does specify though is struggle. The way one might gather blood of skin of an assailant one struggles against is reflected in the opening line: ‘You, with nights under your fingernails.’ The rest of the poem moves from a shower stall, where the person, ‘you’, is drained far beneath what they know, to a place that is alien and unfamiliar. Haunting with a strange light, and places you beneath everything you know and remember: like a mute spectator. Unable to move. It ends back in the shower where:
In fogged-mirror silence
Nothing
Is as still as you
Here is that stillness, that silence. This poem lets me confront it, like a pair of gloves keeping me safe as I study something I know to be tricky. Sometimes frightening.
White: ‘mogra … fragrant in their grief, we wear white in yearning … and like this we are sky’. With ‘White’ on the other hand the meaning is rather clear. We do wear white for mourning. Or ‘yearning’ as I see it. There is a softness I wanted to keep, given the subject here – death. I am an atheist, but I do believe in a peace that nothingness can bring. This is why I never write about spirituality – I would not know what to say. The beauty to me lies in the difference between nothingness and emptiness. In death you perceive the world in a way that is no different from how the mogra does. Or the smoke. Or the air.
Do you follow the contemporary poetry scene in India? How tough was it to publish a volume? Did it help being a part of a publishing house? Do you think that there is a lot of puerile wordsmithery that gets passed off as poetry on social media and self-publishing platforms … or do you see that as a boon?
I enjoy most contemporary poetry published in India. So many poems by Indian poets in India read like magic. I will say that social media poetry, though, is not for me. But it is working for many. Most of us don’t really have time to sit and chat about how we feel these days, and on social media all you get is quick and easy content to consume. I can see how the poems on certain platforms help people slow down as they scroll. I cannot say what is and isn’t art, but I know these works, often presented in a way that is easy to read and understand, are serving people. They would not be so popular otherwise. That said, I am still waiting for other forms of poetry to appear on mainstream accounts.
About publishing the book: I had a huge advantage. As a writer and editor, I need to show all my work that I intend to publish, to my publisher. I am extremely fortunate that Udayan Mitra liked the poems. I wouldn’t want to publish anywhere else in India because I know that we at HarperCollins India put authors first. Why go anywhere else?
Not many people know of your connection to Dharmendra ji. Since many of us are aware of his skills as a poet in Urdu, have you read his work, and more importantly what does he think of your poetry? Can we hope for the grandfather’s poetry translated by the granddaughter?
I think my Instagram account has made the connection clear to anyone who might look for me on the Internet. He was also kind enough to endorse the book and support it on social media and for that I am so grateful. I do not have any of his talent, but I am confident that I will always have his blessings. The same is true about my uncles. Many of their admirers and followers bought books, or at least wrote to say they would – that is one of the best ways of supporting poetry, which is always hard to sell. As for my grandfather’s poetry – with great sadness I must admit I know very little Urdu. I cannot read the script at all. If I could, I would love to translate his work, because I know he puts so much of his heart into every verse, just like he puts his soul into every character he plays on screen. I do want to publish his poetry – if only he would let me!
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(Published in multiple sites)
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Shantanu Ray Chaudhuriis a film buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer. Books commissioned and edited by him have won the National Award for Best Book on Cinema twice and the inaugural MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Images) Award for Best Writing on Cinema. In 2017, he was named Editor of the Year by the apex publishing body, Publishing Next. He has contributed to a number of magazines and websites like The Daily Eye, Cinemaazi, Film Companion, The Wire, Outlook, The Taj, and others. He is the author of two books: Whims – A Book of Poems(published by Writers Workshop) and Icons from Bollywood (published by Penguin/Puffin).
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