There is nothing pedestrian about Urvashi Bahuguna’s debut collection, Terrarium . At the epicentre of the book is our very own “bruised and bumpy earth” examined through the lens of an extraordinary awareness that documents the only things that matter — the earth, its people and its fragile, precious ecosystem. Bahuguna knows “where to find the spigot” and how to turn it on. She writes the sort of family history that also manages to become a micro-history of places and things.
Moving places
In her poem ‘The Heart of a Mango’, for instance, one meets a father who has “eaten over one thousand mangoes”. He chooses the mango over other things for it is his “surest way to feel rich, to feel he has laden our table.”
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The same poem also offers a snapshot history of the Goan mango. Faintly reminiscent of the poems of A.K. Ramanujan,
‘Migrating to Goa’ begins with the entire family on a train from Gujarat. Once in Goa, they settle into a world in which “Every door & window needing a mesh jaali/ to keep the mosquitoes and tree snakes out,” a world which the mother finds bewildering.
Moving places is also a profoundly linguistic experience, one that the poem ‘Seeking a Well-Spoken Gallery Assistant’ takes us through, syllable by syllable.
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Of all the family poems, one that perhaps makes the biggest leaps and the richest connections is the one which portrays the relationship between the speaker and her sister.
‘In Search of Lice and Love’ concludes with the lines “…my sister’s fingers extracting white flakes and tugging at a stray silver hair like a horse galloping through a quiet/ moor. Let my hair be the rope I use to draw tenderness/ out of our clumsy pair like from an old, determined well”.
And then there is the speaker’s grandmother in the pithily titled ‘Equipped’ who is the only one who knows how to deal with a crab that has scuttled out of the kitchen sink. The poet is an equally skilled storyteller, deft at scene-setting. She also yokes together things not often imagined in proximity — love and mosquitoes, for instance.
Bahuguna’s poems draw your attention to the earth, getting you to fall in love with it, just as Ms. Fatima, the Geography teacher, gets her class to do: “Ms. F was strict:/ no chitchatting, no coming late shirt untucked. She sternly/ made us love every hipbone of river route…”
In ‘Urur Olcott Kuppam’, a poem which tells of the destruction of marine life, the poet describes in heartbreaking detail a “diamond-shaped fish so/ translucent it took the colour of my palm”.
Not all poetry books work as collections. This one does, the poems in them rising and falling like waves, the brilliant cover being the first rising wave.
The writer is poet, fiction writer and Professor of Literature at IIT-Madras.
Terrarium; Urvashi Bahuguna , The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective ,