This is a little book of farewell. From a poet who can't write again, and another who won't. Sandwiched between their work is a conversation where they discuss things trivial and tragic, exchange tidbits of nostalgia and probe each other's creativity. (“Poets are like snails without the shells, terribly vulnerable, so easy to crush.”)
Kamala Das and poet, critic and filmmaker Suresh Kohli - an old friend from her Bombay soiree days - made a pact to bring out a book of poetry where they would also air their “reflections of each other's poems”. Kamala died before that. But the road to her death was paved with poetry, as she compulsively penned a poem a day. Her death and Suresh's decision to stop writing poetry suggested the book's title; fitting for a volume whose emotions traverse the earth and invariably settle on one subject. Pathways, avenues, high streets, all running to a dead end.
Words of substance
It's amazing that Kamala Das can lie in what is virtually her death bed, stare the dark stranger in the face, and turn out words of substance. Often uncertain about her own achievements, wracked by pain and feelings of neglect, her words never descend to the mundane. This is a collector's item for her readers, a bequest.
She remembers. She regrets changing her faith and rejects the “religion-game” (“let God be my only playmate”). And yet, her passion for life is undiminished as she swims about in its churning. “For long I have loved this/human race, derived/ pleasure from its antics/and I cannot, just cannot/turn my face away.” The old love returns briefly. Krishna. “How could I, poor Radha,/ believe that you were/ but a dream…”
She stands at the crossroads: “Must I buy myself/a soul/ to replace this?/ There will come a reader eager to chew on it, to taste my vanished seasons.”
Her last poem, Alzheimer's, is about the disease that took her mother's life: “It looked out/through her eyes/although she was/silent as a safe/plundered bare.”
Beginning their conversation, Suresh feels he might be accused of “jumping on your bandwagon to find a publisher”. Actually, this book does injustice to Suresh Kohli. Anyone sharing creative space with a poet such as Kamala Das, even a feeble, dying one, is disadvantaged.
His words often appear burdened by thought and structure. In Death (“I've seen/ the face of death,/lying on a hospital bed,/ gasping for air and breath…”) he has to stretch to explore. While Kamala claims us easily, condensing complication with a core word or conceit: “When directions cease/to exist/pain and pleasure/taste the same,/one becomes one's own collapsing axis…”
The reader is helpless; the scales are tilted. Which is a pity since Suresh has a roving eye and a raw candid feel of what he sees. In relief you step away from that lonely room of remembrance and reach the streets and sights of New York, Sydney, the world.
Emotional span
His words cross a precarious emotional span. The bitterness of squandered relationships: “…sporting the widow's white/ and a distinct bindi/ soliciting sympathy/ that could never be hers.” The angst of a terrorist. And the personal life of a film star and her “comeback to nowhere”. The shocking sight of “teenage motherhood” on American streets: “Stitched back to the/ umbilical cord,/ the child mother/smothers her milkless breasts.” His last is Kamala Das, trying to fathom his friend, haunted by “the look of the lamb/ in your frightened eyes.” And the image lingers, of a friend in pain, now alone.
E-mail: varma@shreevarma.com
Closure: Some Poems and a Conversation;Kamala Das, Suresh Kohli, Harper Collins; Rs. 299.
