A sojourn in Mattancherry triggered a string of childhood memories in poet Anitha Thampi, as the raw warmth of earthy people looked at once unreal and old world-like.
She had gone there to see if she would be able to rustle up something by way of poetry on the place, its people or history. “I went with an open mind, with a deep conviction that I would not write anything casually journalistic or with the insouciance of a tourist. But I came across a clutch of amiable, steely people, each distinctively different and I could relate to them. There was this ex-goonda whom I met excitedly and thought I would write about him, but what transpired in our conversation failed to germinate into a piece of poetry. Over time, I wrote about just five people,” says Ms. Thampi, who has etched word pictures on the people of Mattancherry as part of an ongoing show titled after the place at Uru Art Harbour.
She intends to frequent the place whenever she gets time to ‘unravel’ the myriad social and cultural personae of the place through its distinctive people. The poems adorn the outer wall of the erstwhile warehouse that houses Uru. While it was a carefully crafted project, the pieces came naturally to her. The beaming smile on the face of Pratti, the washerwoman from the Tamil Vannar caste that was traditionally into laundry services, pulled her to the person.
“She sees off the clothes,
neatly ironed and folded,
to return with the smell,
smear and sweat of the land…,” she writes about Pratti.
Similarly, the poem on Sarah Cohen, among the last few members of the Jews of Mattancherry, sympathetically images the nonagenarian’s conflicting existence wedged between Kerala that has been her home since birth and the Jewish Promised Land.
There are poems on Chandrakala, a maker of moon-shaped papads, her name rhyming with the Malayalam word for moon; Nelson Fernandez, who had penned the lyrics of the songs that the soulful rendition of West Kochi’s Mehboob bhai made household numbers; and Maimunni Ali, a living martyr of the 1953-Mattancherry police firing on the labourers who were protesting the ‘chappa’ system of awarding work. He sells fish in the market to date for a living.
“The experience was enriching on two counts. First, it kindled in me something that’s grounded and connecting people. The place, people, their life, it’s all starkly visual. Second, the interactions also influenced and altered the process of my creative practice,” says the poet.
