Poets are turning to the novel. Why? Then again, why on earth not? Fiction presents a cerebral challenge — the plot and how your characters knuckle under or square up to circumstances. And you are manufacturing time — a self-designed past, present and future. Incidentally, even non-novelists can tamper with time. See how our right-wing brigade has turned science fiction’s extraterrestrial travel on its head. Time travel was in the past. Ask any member of the brigade and he will tell you that travelling from, say, ‘Parikshitgah’ or ‘Hastinapur’ to ‘Kalpurush’ (Orion) or ‘Krittika’ (Pleiades) or to ‘Rohini’ (Aldeberan), was as common in ancient India as getting into a bus today at Connaught Place, now named Indira Chakkar and Rajiv Chauk.
Quite a few Indian poets have crossed the floor. Meena Kandasamy was long-listed for the DSC prize last year for her novel The Gypsy Goddess, a searing fictional account of atrocities committed against Dalits. Anjum Hasan has written three novels, two of them about a North Eastern girl coming to Bengaluru. C.P. Surendran came out with a fine novel Hadal, on the fake cases against the scientists and the so-called Maldivian ‘Mata Hari’. Surendran knows every bit of land he is talking about and the narrative is taut as a coiled spring. Why wasn’t the book shortlisted for any of the prizes?
Keki Daruwalla But these Johnnies-come-lately novelists can’t forget their moorings. They lapse into verse at times. The first few pages of Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis , shortlisted (Booker), and winner (DSC Prize), are first-rate poetry. If I may be allowed a remark loaded with malice, they sound better than some of his verse. Seriously, his Collected Poems post a high watermark for the past year.
Some fine poetry has appeared recently. Anupama Raju ( Nine ) and K. Srilata ( Bookmarking the Oasis ) are both stuck on windows. Raju has an entire ghazal on windows.
We met a thousand years ago by a lonely window
I was a wild rose then growing by your window...
Lost scents hang lazily from an old heavy sky
Sting like rain on abandoned nights. Shut that window.
Srilata’s first poem starts: ‘ I didn’t know I loved windows so much/ but I do — enough to wrestle/ someone to the ground over them,/ so light can, once again, flood my eyes.’ A lot of light ricochets from her poems into the reader’s eyes. This poem, ‘Things I didn’t know I loved’ (after Nazim Hikmet) has some striking imagery: ‘ I didn’t know I loved the idea/ of night descending like a tired bird...’
The first thing that strikes a reader of Anupama Raju’s poems is the excellent line she starts a poem with. Chosen at random, sample these: ‘The possibility of windows and the finality of walls/ the irony of life and the innocence of death’; ‘The dead have a way with visitors’; ‘Love drinks me dry, yet I smell like rain.’ ‘Old doors wake up to a rusty doorbell’; ‘The lights go out every time you pack your bags and leave.’ That’s half the battle. It is like a boundary off the first ball of the last over in a T20 match going to the wire. With me, the first lines dictate the rhythm and mood of the entire poem. They are crucial.
What does a good start prove? Inspiration. Raju has the good sense to keep her poems short before mean critics like me can enquire whether she can sustain that initial burst. She can, of course, stray. A poet needs to contrive a lot writing a ghazal. The last word in the second line of each couplet leads you by the nose. Take these awkward lines from the poem ‘Folk Song’ : ‘ The rain filled your stomach, you rose with water/ poured into an empty nest, your weeping village.’ But this one was an aberration. Raju needs to be known for her daring, her brush with the surreal in certain poems and the near philosophical: ‘He eats time because his days shrivel into ants/ gathering around dead conversation.’
Most of Srilata’s poems are short meditations on the fabric of life. As Ranjit Hoskote puts it so well in his introduction, her poems are “like long fuses spelling out the taut distances between ignition and explosion or like sutras revealing themselves in short lines…” Take her poem ‘Mining’: ‘ This is a different labour/ This arriving at a non-place, and hoping for an occasional strike/ of words thick and dark,/ like diamond goddesses in the making .’
A good poet is nothing if not ambitious, and ambition means nothing if it is not prepared to pole vault rather than jump fences. Take ‘A Foliage of Sky Tongues’— the title is itself a declaratory of intent. ‘ In this country unfamiliar/ where fishermen fish/ for the dreams of drowned men…’ How beautifully put.
Both these poets write too much about poetry. Not a good sign. I read somewhere that when poets are devoid of subjects, they write about writing. And in the end we return to windows. Srilata’s poem ‘A Diminishing of Metaphors’: ‘In this part of the world/ where a slow diminishing of metaphors/ has occurred/ windows are nothing / but phony bits of glass/ and on the other side, tunnels/ that are human eyes.’
Keki Daruwalla is a poet and short story writer
