We have lost poets, Eunice de Souza and Vijay Nambisan. I did not know Vijay Nambisan well enough, my loss. The saddest part is he left early, when still in his poetic prime. The novelist Kaveri Nambisan, his wife, must have taken it hard. Eunice I was privileged to know rather well and we grew up as poets together, along with quite a few others — Kolatkar, Kamala Das, Gieve Patel, Adil Jussawalla. You figure in anthologies, now and then review each other, bitch about lack of reviews, or non-poets getting ‘poetic’ limelight, hear each other read — that’s how it goes. I am delivering a memorial lecture in her honour at a well-known Delhi college. So I will just touch upon her last book Learn from the Almond Leaf.
A first book brands you — introvert, cop, satirist — and so her first book Fix stamped Eunice as a terrific satirist. Her mellower books don’t catch the public eye. Almond Leaf sounds like a serene ending to a Chopin concerto.
Hanging by a wing
‘ Learn from the almond leaf/ which flames as it falls ’ are the first lines of the book. Could these lines also map the trajectory of her life and poetry? Please remember that this short poem ends with the lines, ‘ flamboyance is all ,’ and her earlier poems were flamboyant. Rilke expressed similar sentiments in The Duino Elegies . ‘ O trees of life , when does your winter come? ’ And in the end he says, ‘ Flowering and fading comes to us both at once .’ It does. Good poets/ writers often think alike. Her poem ‘Kite season’ needs to be quoted in full:
The trees are festooned with kites
of many colours.
The trees are festooned with birds
hanging by a wing
an entangled leg
glass-coated string.
An imagistic poem ending with a punch line. She complains about the heat. ‘Western Ghats’ is a lovely nature poem — ‘ Fling my ashes in the Western Ghats… may there be mist and waterfalls,/ grass and flowers/ in the wrong season .’ She has her wicked poems, of course, the ‘first-floor procuress’, her bosom preceding her, the dog who sniffs crotches, and is avoided by people for ‘ he knows too many secrets .’
She has poems on baby parrots, egrets, crows, trees. The final nonchalant yet in a way grim poem, ‘ Tell me Mr. Death/ Date, Time, Place’, she goes on to say she has ‘ to make an appointment for a pedicure ’. Farewell, Eunice.
Amarnath was in the news recently — for wrong reasons, the killing of pilgrims. I had made a hurried visit in 1979, trekking through miles of snow, I had gone much earlier than the yatra. My most vivid memory is of the intense blue we, my wife and I, found in the Sheshnag glacier-cum-lake. The cave was fine, the stalactite snowed in with myth in all its icy glory. I was browsing through Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and came upon ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, and lines which took me back to Amarnath.
‘I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears
The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom...
Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer
Even the newts are white.
Nowhere else are such caves accorded worship. But you can’t keep poetry away from ice-caves and stalactites.
The line, ‘ The light burns blue ’ (which is what caught my attention first) is filched straight from Shakespeare’s Richard III . It is Richard’s speech before the Battle of Bosworth Field (I remember it by heart). Richard is visited by all the ghosts of those he has murdered. The light burning blue, my Professor Dad told me, indicates spectral presence, that ghosts are around, buddy. Richard also says, ‘ It is now dead midnight, cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh ’. The lines tell the afternoon ale-swilling Elizabethan crowd that the scene is enacted at midnight and Richard has seen ghosts.
Moon flowers
Some poems by young women writers have come my way. Here’s one by the distinguished R.J. Kalpana from Chennai. She writes on mythological women, not a good investment, as she watches ‘ swans silver a dark lake ’, catches a ‘ fragrance of moon flowers/ and the sorceries of their joy in the air .’ Madam, write on some nat-khat apsara ambushing a Rishi’s tapasya!
A twilight poem by Kalpana: TWILIGHT I take an apple to bed/ He bites me and smiles/ I consider all options/ Tease, taunt, attack/ I lay down an indifferent green/ Almost but not quite juicy/ Almost but not quite tangy/ An in-between taste of here and there/ He rises a darkened shadow over me/ /Perhaps searching for a lost Eden/ I wonder where my life has been.
Samreen Sajeda from Bombay has simple poems, crystal clear. Anything wrong with being clear as crystal?
This is ‘Sealed’: I have shut my heart / To lock you out,/So that you can/ Not/ Walk in at will/Wreck it/And walk out.
Another poem, ‘Untitled 1’ goes: ‘ Be intimate with pain/ It won’t break trust/ Unlike fickle bliss/ Trespassing at will/ Before slipping away/ As quietly as it came.’
The author is a poet and novelist.
