This term at school, my ten-year-old son is learning about similes, metaphors and poetry. “My eyes are dark like the night,” he wrote this week, as part of his language homework. I thought he had finished, and waited for him to move on to his maths homework. But he was still writing. He added: “Before Diwali.”
My eyes are dark like the night before Diwali.
My son gets poetry instinctively. He listens to Bob Dylan, plays the harmonica, and gets that things are interconnected, tangled up, strongly felt, sometimes beautiful, and that there is a mystery at the heart of it.
It took me much longer. When I was in high school, a bit older than my son is now, I read Nissim Ezekiel’s poem, ‘Night of the Scorpion’, in a school anthology.
“I remember the night my mother / was stung by a scorpion. Ten hours/of steady rain had driven him/to crawl beneath a sack of rice.”
As a schoolgirl growing up in the city, in a nation that was eager to modernise, I had never seen a scorpion, or a sack of rice, or even a village. I found it strange, unsettling and cruel that the family and the neighbours seemed to do nothing to heal the poor woman. That the father of the narrator had even
“poured a little paraffin / Upon the bitten toe and put a match to it.”
How could he bring himself to do that? Why didn’t they just go to a doctor? Why were they not doing anything to solve this? What mumbo jumbo was this? It felt foreign and unconnected to me. I was baffled and angry.
Stung by a scorpionMy father, who is usually a man of few words, told me a story about his childhood. He was born in pre-Independent India. As a child, he had walked barefoot to his village school till the tenth standard when his eldest brother was able to buy him his first pair of shoes. My grandparents’ family had a cow named Lakshmi and a calf named Venkatraman. As the youngest boy in the house, it was my father’s task to walk the cow and her calf to the Cauvery river early in the morning, bathe the animals and bring them back. It was a long and difficult route; they had to cross the railway line on the way. To add to his struggle, the cow ambled along and the calf was as frisky as a young pup. On the way back from the river one day, my father was bitten by a scorpion. He was in unbearable pain, his body began convulsing.
“It still hurts to think of it,” says my 81-year-old father, shaking his head, when I ask him now about the incident.
Through the day, my grandparents tried everything: prayers, poultice, consecrated ash, weeping. Those were days when children could die after two days of fever; who could fight a scorpion’s poison?
Finally, after nightfall, someone mentioned a nightwatchman in a nearby neighbourhood who was also a Sufi healer. Without a moment’s hesitation, my father’s elder brother lifted up the little child in his arms and ran all the way to the healer.
I can imagine it now: the older boy standing in front of the healer, panting, his eyes desperate, his younger brother in his arms. Family members and neighbours standing around silently. The healer sighing, putting down his lantern and his lathi. Settling his blanket on his chair. Standing up. Murmuring a prayer for a few minutes.
“You know, something worked,” said my father. “I don’t know how it happened. The shivering stopped.”
Ezekiel’s poem had led me right up to a moment in my father’s childhood. It had shown me a way to talk to my father.
Being a parentReflecting on the final lines of Ezekiel’s poem today, as a mother with two children, I think of what it means to be a parent. I feel a pang of fear and comprehension:
“My mother only said / Thank God the scorpion picked me / And spared my children.”
Those were exactly my mother’s words on the day she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer: Thank God it’s not my children.
Thank God the crab picked me and spared my children.
In her weeks and months in the hospital, my mother read more and more poetry. She read novels too, as she always had, but sometimes she would pause and pick up a book of poetry. She especially read Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson. You should read more poetry, she told me.
Sometimes she would copy out small verses on scraps of paper, and leave them absently within the pages of the novels she was reading at the time. She loved reading Richmal Crompton’s William books. The chemotherapy sessions were intense and left her devastated for days, but she still needed to undergo them. It was rather like the bit of paraffin and the match in Ezekiel’s poem. To help her get through the chemotherapy, my husband bought her the entire set of William books.
One day, many years after she was gone, I opened Just William . A piece of paper with lines from an Emily Dickinson poem fell out, copied in my mother’s tiny, precise, rounded handwriting:
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers- / That perches in the soul-…”
In her last months, when she was too frail for novels, my mother read the poetry of Arun Kolatkar. She read Jejuri and Sarpa Satra and the Kala Ghoda Poems . One morning, after coughing sleeplessly through the night, the metallic cough that the doctors had warned would result when the cancer reached her lungs, she pointed with her treatment-burnt fingers to Kolatkar’s poem ‘An Old Woman’.
“And you are reduced / to so much small change / in her hand.”
A thing to have everydayOne of my high school English teachers used to say that poetry was salad for the mind: crisp and crunchy and green, a good thing to have a bit of everyday. A useful thing to learn, she would say, when you have to wait at the bus stop or in the doctor’s waiting room. She made us memorise poems, bless her heart. Bits of poetry remain in my memory now, thanks to her.
“It takes much time to kill a tree, / Not a simple jab of the knife / Will do it...”
Or:
“Weavers, weaving at break of day...”
There was a poem, ‘Abou Ben Adhem’, by James Leigh Hunt. I would stand at the bus stop waiting for the BTS Number 20 bus, and as I shifted restlessly from foot to foot, waiting for the bus, my mind would go to
“Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)”.
The habit of memorising poems stayed with me in college. A couple of days back, in traffic on the way to work, I looked at the great, overarching canopy of trees on the Old Airport Road and thought of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, one of the loveliest things I have read:
“That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang…”
Suddenly, for that moment, as the Bangalore sun shone down through the lacy branches, I got it. That things are interconnected, tangled up, strongly felt, sometimes beautiful, and that there is a mystery at the heart of it.
Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta is in the IAS, currently based in Bengaluru.
