It’s interesting that all three collections are slim volumes with hundred-odd, sparsely populated pages. It’s interesting because of how much bigger each feels, and how exhaustive. And, at a glance, they also each evoke a palpably different mood. Each collection ends with a lingering emotion quite different from what the other leaves behind and yet, they attempt together to create a voice that pulls at half-forgotten, half-remembered memories. In their own way, each volume is filled with familiar poems.
Oh, their words are new; surprisingly new in the way they sit next to each other and the music they make. The harmony, though, and those little chords they strike, that feeling they pull out of you? That’s familiar. And some of them become poems that like they were written just for you.
In The Seduction of Delhi , Abhay K. remembers a ‘palimpsest city’. Each page, its few lines sitting across a painting by Tarshito, is a memory, a little piece of Delhi — a place, a memory, a portrait. Abhay gives them a voice. His words don’t sit outside and observe. They dig in, making their subject their home, and then they turn outwards, watching the landscape, the people, the city, change. The city makes him feel, and these feelings seep into his words. Whether it is the Lal Qila, a ‘Fading reflection/in a mirage/of Delhi’, or the Yamuna, who flows past Delhi ‘Withdrawn and sulky’, Abhay’s words cast an observant eye over the city, and take in both its beauty and its horror. They remember how in Lodhi Garden, “The smell/of wet earth/ blends with the fragrance/ of fresh flowers/and ancient blood/ shed over Delhi’s conquests’ and how in Ugrasen ki Bauli, ‘Thick walls of dressed stones adorn recessed arches’.
The Seduction of Delhi is a very different guide to the city. It takes a scenic route, and stops often, allowing you to take in the city’s beauty, its people, its problems. It doesn’t hesitate before the Immigrant, doesn’t overlook the flower girl, and has time to take in both Zauq’s regret and Ghalib’s tragedy.
Aditi Rao’s collection, too, is beautiful. The cover illustration by Jericha Senyak is a riot of bold, arresting colours; an apt door for the work inside. Almost every poem in Rao’s collection is intimate, bold, and unflinchingly honest. In ‘Athazagoraphobia’, Rao burrows into the idea of forgetting, of being forgotten and of remembering. It’s a poem full of questions, the last one being: ‘If you wanted to come back, would you find the way? The birds ate the crumbs.’
As you read on, and with Rao, it’s almost impossible to not read on, you also get the deep urge to read aloud. ‘I want to believe in the poet’s moon, but I have stopped looking’, and ‘My back accepts the slow imprint of six hundred years of stone’ … they compel you to give them a voice. This is one of Rao’s biggest triumphs — creating poetry that makes you want to taste it on your tongue.
Each poem in The Fingers Remember is entirely human, entirely real. The pool of doubts, compulsions, fears and joys it draws upon may have specific contexts, but they also hold a universal appeal. Interspersed with personal pictures, snapshots of emails exchanged and notes scribbled upon coffee shop napkins, Rao’s poems are almost confessional. And yet, they belong to the readers. They burrow in and dig out half-remembered memories, evoke feelings you couldn’t put into words and, more than anything else, they help you understand.
Unlike Rao and Abhay, Madhurima Duttagupta’s Goddess and Whore has a very clear motive. She weaves, with each poem, a picture of a woman, and a woman’s journey. She speaks of rape and assault and abuse, and of a woman’s life and self-discovery. On their own, the issues beg addressing repeatedly, and in as many ways as possible. In these poems though, they’ve been approached in too tired a manner. The images are familiar, the metaphors used almost synonymous with women.
Duttagupta writes of the burden of women relegated to roles as goddesses or whores; of sindoor and motherhood, of daughters and romance. Lines like this one in Fasting Red , ‘it cuts through/ my thick dark hair/ and fills the parting/ with its crimson red’ or ‘My little one—/ you make me seem so tall/ your unfaltering faith/ teaches me to be responsible’ echo old ideas with new phrases. Unfortunately, these tired clichés also happen to be true; only now, relegated to clichés, they do not quite convince or provoke.
Sometimes, the collection sparks with brilliance, a turn of phrase or an idea nudging the readers. More often than not, though, it fails to capture the imagination.
The Seduction of Delhi; Abhay K., Bloomsbury India, Rs.299.
Goddess & Whore; Madhurima Duttagupta, Bookwise Publisher, Rs.199.
The Fingers Remember; Aditi Rao, Yoda Press, Rs. 250.
