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
No comments:
Post a Comment