When God is a Traveller

 When God  is a Traveller

Arundhathi Subramanium’s travelling God looks at the world with human eyes, keeping pace through our travails and tribulations. Her latest book of poems ‘When God is A Traveller’ was the focus at the Goa Art Lit Festival last month. She has published two collections of poems ‘On Cleaning Bookshelves’ and ‘Where I Live’, and co-edited ‘Confronting Love’, a collection of Indian love poems. In recent years, her spiritual quest has led her to publish ‘The Book of Buddha’ and ‘Sadhguru: More Than A Life’. She is the editor of the Indian domain of the Poetry International Web, besides being a cultural curator and critic. The first section Deeper In Transit in the latest book  houses poems from her previous collections and When God is a Traveller, the second section comprises a new set of poems for the present edition. She is part of the contingent of poets ( five in all ) who have  been shortlisted for the Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry to be announced at the Jaipur Lit Fest in a few days’ time.

Over the years, Arundhati has become a strong poetic presence in India. The style is lyrical with embedded rhymes, juxtaposed with rapier-sharp wordplay and a craft sharpened, to a precision-like perfection. She introduces the reader to the verticality of  lyrical verse, leaving pedestrian prose far behind. She revels in poetry and her own poetic creativity: the need to believe/there is octane enough/in a bequest of verbs/to gallop/dive/scoop/abduct/rescue/ reader and writer/in the long hard ride/ into the sunset/the need to believe language/will see us through/and that old, old need to go, typo-free, to the printer. Her poem Leapfrog follows the metaphorical trajectory of a tadpole leaping and swimming a trail of nouns and verbs networked into a communicable language to his mates: Grant me the fierce tenderness of watching/ word slither into word/into the miraculous algae of language/untamed by doubt or gravity/words careening/diving/swarming/unforming, wilder/than snowstorms in Antarctica, wetter/ than days in Cherapunjee/leaping to some place the voice /is still learning to reach.

She has well been hailed the love poet of India. A simmer of hormone and a carnal need, a shudder in the loins is levitated to a metaphysical attainment of vacancy and nothingness. Frissons get elevated to fusions and surrender to the oblivion and vastness beyond comprehension. Demand, Black Oestrus, Lover’s Tongue, and Rutting are poems that choreograph the sheer sensuousness of words and rhyme into a verbal rhythm of erotic poetry: ravish you/with the rip, snarl/and grind of canine/and molar, taste the ancestral grape/ that mothered you, your purpleness/swirling down my gullet/but it still won’t be me enough/there was nothing simple about it even then/an eleven-year-old’s hunger for the wet perfection/an undoing/an unmaking/raw/raw-/a monsoonal ferocity/of need/reminding you/ that this uncensored wilderness of greed/is simply/or not so simply/body.

Here I cannot but mention the commingling of the sacred and sensual in Indian classical dance performances. Arundhati, for whom words dance in poetry, wrote a cadenced wordplay of love for the exponent of Bharatnatyam,  Alarmel Valli. A collaboration which led Valli to “embroider a dance poem around the tonality and imagery of the word poem’’, a grand finale to the performance “Only Until the Light Fades: Love in Dance and Poetry”, emphasizing “the  unique, eternal and yet contemporary, timeless and topical quality of love.” 

Mystery is the province of poetry. And yet, it illuminates and invokes a visceral exaltation from within, very akin to music. The patterned language and tonal quality of the poems Fit, Almost Shiva, Watching the Steamrollers Arrive, Border and Shoe Zen, stirs the senses and then percolates to the neural pathways of being, resonating a symphony familiar and sedate. A human soul lost, ravaged and utterly perplexed by storms outside and within and then in a moment of time an epiphany -The Way You Arrive, the way your words reach me/phantom-walking/through all these tensile/suspicious membranes of self/the way you unclog/these streets and by-lanes/so I can surge/through star shine and aqueduct/the luminous canals of a world/turned Venetian/the way you enter/and the day’s events scatter/like islands in the sea/the way you arrive.

And  then,  Arundhati leads you from a solitary reaper to a shared communion of relationships. The poem Sharecropping is a tailor-made fit of her connection with her mother. Right from the title to the lines: sowing the same dream/ in a different self / she treads nimbly/across language/I vowel every now and then/into mouldering inertias/and she watches me / as I grow stealthily/ into her body/ here it is then /the treachery/ of love/ it gets no closer than this, Mum// there is a coupling connect and a disconnect.  Forever Connected is a poignant yet stark imagery of Geishas and their synapses with the living world: heart chakras unclogged/by the Great Express Highway/our ducts sweetened by after-mint/and Kenny G , the Peepul between us felled/to unclutter the view/the arrangements are in place /love will follow//

The piece de resistance of the series would be the Eight Poems for Shakuntala. So here you are/just another mixed–up kid/daughter of a sage/and celestial sex worker/clueless/like the rest of us/about your address/the clue Shakuntala is not to see it / as betrayal/ when the ceiling crumbles/ and you walk/into a night of stars. An age-old myth punctuated, twisted into a parody by the lyricism of modernism. And what you might say of the ending/yes, it’s cosy/family album in place/a kid with a name/to bequeath to a country/perhaps even a chipped magnet/on the refrigerator door.  Inline are more such flowing lines in other poems:  Six About Love Stories and When God is a Traveller. The latter from which the book gets its title is a tribute to the god Kartikeya/Muruga/Subramania/her namesake.  A god who has seen it all, who himself is the creator of this Maya and yet : trust the god/ back from his travels/ ready to circle the world all over again/this time for no reason at all/ other than to see it/ through your eyes//

Hierarchies of Crisis and The City and I are recordings of a flux of emotions in the aftermath of terrorist strikes on spaces we call our own. Returning to Bombay after 26/11, she writes: This time we didn’t circle each other/the city and I/ hackles raised/fur bristling/this time there was space/between us/for the woman on the 7.10 Bhayandar slow/with green combs in her hair/to say /he’s coming to get me/this time/the city surged/towards me/mangy/bruised-eyed/non-vaccinated/suddenly /mine//.   Living with Earthquakes, Quick-fix Memos for Difficult Days and Confession,  are poems about life boulders; Catnap, Learning to Say Yes, Flagbearers and Swimming make way for riverine green and sweet lime. – Gingerbread boys/run away but return eventually/to their bakers/deep within your seashell heart/you hear it again/the oceanic roar/that reminds you/that it’s happening/ right now/ life is here//.  We could say that her writing shape-shifts the contours of life’s muddles; and if there is noise, then there is silence too, a belonging and an alienation, darkness and dazzling, fear and hope, ends and beginnings. The beat of the words arms readers to comprehend life in all its pauses, blanks and holes – the uncertainties, doubts – to live a passionate life in a space of John Keats “negative capability.”

If the reader would like to go with my picks then the poems, The Other Side of Tablecloths, Or Take Mrs Salim Shaikh, I Speak for Those with Orange Lunch Boxes, Transplant and Bhakti are originals in a satirical cheeky sense, puns galore! Bhakti (with some adulteration) has your attention as soon as you read the title and ends with an echo very much like modern American poetry – Allow me to uncork you/ in the middle/of days that rattle like coke cans/so I can steal a whiff/a whiff, no more/of your crazy liquor/decant into my hipflask/Settle down in my pocket/Stay illicit// Transplant likewise ends with the gnarled age old banyan asking to be –a little less ancient/a little less universal/a little less absolute/a little more bloody/bonsai//. The first poem in my line of favourites: Miss Guzder’s outrage was moral/A girl like you – I never expected it- how could you? Before her the underside/of my tablecloth/snarling green mayhem/of equatorial rainforest/seething beneath an upfront view/of convent-educated daffodils//

Now, before you reread the article

Go, buy the book

Savour; let it ravish you

Marinate in it

The alchemy will astound you

The Storyteller

   

A FIVE YEAR OLD BOY is the protagonist of the Booker nominated book ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue. The story is narrated from his perspective which is pretty constricted as he is imprisoned in a room with his Ma since he was born. For him the outside world, fresh air, flowers, other people are just fairy tales. His reality is a eleven square foot room and one other human being - old  Nick, the man responsible for abducting Ma and continually raping her. A transition from the room to the world outside is a shattering experience for him and his Ma. What makes it utterly poignant and avant garde for the reader is the narration from the boy’s point of view. He is the triumph on which the book rides high. Structuring of a book is an art ever so subtle and masterful in the hands of great writers. The craft is prevalent, though superbly restrained, and holding the entire work seamlessly together. The narrator who tells the story is distinctly chosen by the writer, after great thought. Unusual narrators have contributed to the uniqueness of a book of fiction

 It happened yet again. Nilanjana Roy, the journalist and literary critic released her first book – ‘The Wildings, in which the narrators are CATS, cheels, dogs and tigers. Successful people don’t do different things , they do things differently. Imagine hearing the story from the perspective of cats, which she set out to do initially but later with the progression of the book other interesting animals too found a voice in the narration.

A masterstroke would be ‘My Name is Red’ by Orhan Pamuk in which the first narrator is a CORPSE. The book is narrated in 20 different voices, with a dog, a horse and the colour RED, too, taking turns to narrate the story of a miniaturist illuminator who is murdered in medieval Turkey. Here, we cannot but talk about DEATH as the narrator of ‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak. The over busy death, weary and cynical of retrieving souls during World War II in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, is a humane entity, devoid of grotesque monstrosity, serving its purpose with great empathy. If I say a grandfatherly figure, I wouldn’t be far from it.

To take the conversation further, the first section of ‘Sound and Fury’ is from the point of view of an AUTISTIC  33-year old man Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, a source of shame to the family due to his autism. The narration is a series of non-chronological events and shifts haphazardly. Limited by himself he cannot interpret time, cause and effect and conceives happenings through visual and auditory stimulus. Moving on to the autistic brave boy Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year-old boy who describes himself as "a mathematician with some behavioral difficulties” is a deserving mention here, from the book ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.’ Finding a keen grasp of his social fears, he solves the mystery of the murder of the dog and then goes on to find his mother. An appealing, quirky novel. A great feat, using a narrator with asperger syndrome.’ The chapters are numbered according to prime numbers; the book is filled with mathematical puzzles, maps and illustrations.

‘Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka is told by a GIANT INSECT– a young lad morphed into an insect. A symbolic, multi-layered story of human complexities.  ‘The Art of Racing in the Rain’ by Garth Stein uses brilliant narrative device. The narrator is the know-all old dog Enzo, who has mastered human behavior by watching TV when his master is away. The story of the master who is an aspiring car-racer is relayed from the perspective of his dog, who is as good as human except for opposable thumbs and no speech. He takes us through the joys and pains of marriage of his master, meddling in-laws, illness, highs and lows of a race-car driver. A catchy read with emotional strings attached to it. You will never be able to look at a dog in the same way again.

‘The Screwtape Letters’ by C.S Lewis is in the voice of two DEVILS who exchange letters between themselves. The letters appeared during the dark days of World War II and later came out as a book dedicated to his friend TRR Tolkien “The secrets out. You've stumbled upon a mysterious series of recorded conversations between two demons tasked with securing the demise of their human patients.” Delightfully disturbing (and often diabolically humorous) entertainment, The Screwtape Letters will open your eyes and ears to the devil's schemes — and to the One who has overcome them.”

 Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist in Invisible Man ushers readers to the stare and gaze of racial American society. A society who sees and yet does not see the black man as an individual in his own right. This looking without registering  impacts the victim and reduces him to a non entity with psychological repercussions of withdrawal, suppression and violence.

No doubt all the books mentioned above have been a great success of their times. Next time you set out to write a book, think hard who is going to do the talking.