jayaz hai darna janab aamad-e-roz-e-jazaa se
hota hai yahaan jo
sab aap hi ki razaa se
mehak phoolan ki
fakat nahi kuchle patton ka
naala-gham-e-zaar
bhi to mukhaatib hai yahan fiza se
nafaham hain jujhte
hain saraab-e-haqeeqat larazaan se
magar bolte hain ke
vaakif hain khaamoshi ki sazaa se
na samajh lein
hamein gunehgaar-e-barabar-e-mataakab
ye darr hai ya
khuda bada khauf-e-kazaa se
issi tehzeeb-o-sakafat mein hui parvarish
aur ab dushmani ho
gayi rooh ki gazaa se?
hum abhi nahi bolenge
abhi to internet chalta hai
ghar thik hai, chulha jalta hai
kuch sahme bhi hain, kuch
darte hain. aur kaam bahut hai
sar jhukaaye apna kaam karte hain
abhi tumhare ghar jalaye jayenge
phir tumhein par dange karvane ke
mukadme chalaye jayenge
hum yahin kuch door khade dekhenge
jab saajish ki kahaaniyaan bana kar
tumheon jailon me phekenge
tum se hamdardi hamein zaroor hai
magar kya hai ki
hamare ghar abhi door hain
aur phir kya sach hai kya
jhooth, sach kahein to
hamein theek se nahi maaloom
yoon hi kya sadkon pe utar aayein?
kisi ke liye
kisi ke khilaaf naarey lagaein?
jab bheed banker ye hamari taraf aayenge
tab dekhenge kya karna hai
un se mil jana hai ya ladna hai
tab in baton ka ghaata-munafa tab tolenge
hum abhi nahi bolenge
Many years ago now my cousin told me this: my aunt would tell her at bedtime that sleeps fly through the air, spreading out over the land like fruit bats leaving their roost on leisurely wing beats. You had to catch one in your eyes and then keep them shut, lest it flee to someone else – perhaps even to the rightful owner. For clearly, as we all know, there are more people in the world than there is sound sleep. (Like the poet lamented: why so many poets, o lord, and so little poetry to go around?) Fleet footed sleep, one for each, no one’s to keep.
Someone
must’ve waylaid my sleep last night, for I was up a bit later than usual,
reading. And so when I did put off the lights and lay down still, it was a
stream of words that my eyes caught instead, blinking away as they put them
into staggered lines like typecast. My husband can hear my eyelashes scrape
against the pillow and know that I’m up, thinking. He puts his arms around me
then, to help me sleep. That is just one of the vast repository of lovable
gestures that he is the master of. So aware of me, so generous, so
demonstrative. But he wasn’t around
last night and my thoughts inevitable turned to lovers past. And who better to
share these with than the stars? So I stepped out.
Maybe they trap them by the dozen now –
hundreds even, like Amur Falcons in Nagaland – in mist nets, to sell for a good
price. Don’t open your eyes; they have traps set up for sleep.
The new
moon had set and the stars were like fireflies in the swaying trees. There must
be a better metaphor for that, I thought, and they immediately turned into
lights flaring on distant ships tossing upon the stormy sea of eucalyptus
leaves. I paced the courtyard, whirling like a dervish to frame the dots within
the gaps, to join them in familiar shapes. When you’ve spent enough time with
the stars they take on poses that only you can see. Orion with his bow drawn
taut had already gone over the horizon, and his dachshund, with the jewel of
Sirius in his collar had followed close behind. Straight overhead, Virgo lay
back languorous to rub the belly of Leo, who sat up all of a sudden to see what
Hydra was looking at. Triangulating my way from the more familiar characters, I
arrived to the eucalyptus trees and was surprised to see Argo, sailing on its
eternal voyage with Jason and the Argonauts to bring back the Golden Fleece. It
was no coincidence then.
I sat down
on the steps at the end of the courtyard and the wind rose, blowing in gusts so
the susurrant leaves sounded like incoming waves washing over me, lifting me
bodily and tilting me till the world seemed to keel. That’s how it is with
first love too. The only thing missing was the hyena. That was a long time ago.
Ten years now. Man, I’m growing old! (Don’t ‘man’ me, my husband would say. He
doesn’t like me talking like that, “like a teenager trying to sound cool”, he
says.)
Everyone
else had gone to bed while I sat up with the boy who first showed me the stars.
It was our first trip together to the forest and we didn’t want to miss a
thing. Who knew when the forest might bestow upon us its magic, the precious
encounter, the moment that we’d remember for the rest of our lives? And so we sat
on the steps of the veranda of the forest guest house, letting the night wash
over us, bringing us closer.
My memory
colours the hyena a shimmering silver, striped as if with deep shadows, the fur
along its back bristling. It walked across the lawn against the far hedge, from
the right to the left; it did not even know that it was watched. And it paints
the boy next to me as a cool presence in thin cotton pyjamas, his skin smelling
of the forest stream; for he always knew what one ought to be doing at any
moment, and that’s where we’d been going for our evening baths – to a small
rocky pool where giant spiders had stretched their webs to catch the hairy
caterpillars that fell with alarming regularity.
I haven’t
really given in to memories like this before: it feels a bit like cheating. Do
mothers think about what their lives could’ve been if they hadn’t had kids? And
does that make them bad mothers?
Memories lie dormant like little voles in the
winter. They must be roused and fed and allowed to gambol about once in a
while, allowed a spring and a summer so to speak, however brief; lest they go
into a sleep too deep and be lost forever. I held this one in the hollow of my
hand, holding it up next to my face the better to see, and it snuggled in,
making the most of the warmth. It was so close I could smell the dust on its
fur…
The crunch
of dry leaves startled me, bringing me back with a jolt to the treed courtyard
with the swaying eucalyptus. I looked up and saw a large black mass move
against the silhouetted trees. Bristles along its back shimmered in the
starlight colandering through trees, and I held my breath. Then the light shone
upon its tushes. He got wind of me after he had passed me and he paused, gave
me a perfunctory grunted nod, and then snuffled on, his stiff tail wagging. A wild
boar. I’d sometimes seen him about during the day, his sleep having eluded him.
Maybe sleeps sometimes
do double shifts, going to the animals of the night once we wake up, taking
with them our restless dreams and then bringing us theirs.
“So when you eventually did decide to settle down, why did you pick
a place so far away?” I asked Santokh.
Last year, I met and stayed
for a couple of days with Santokh Sarungbam – writer, thinker, story teller,
farmer, inveterate confabulator. The following passages are based on
conversations I had with her, interspersed with some of her poems.
Distance brings things together
There’s poetry in everything
but most of all there’s
poetry in the links between things
in the analogies that arise
between things distant,
seemingly unrelated
I guess when you look at
things from far enough away
they will inevitably seem to
meet
like the tall buildings in
the cities that seem
to lean together
conspiratorially
when you look up at them
from the street
like the mountain peaks
when seen from afar
like the parallel tracks of
the railway lines
meeting at infinity
Distance brings things
together
I stumbled upon a book of poems in a little book shop in Lower Sohra (Cherrapunji) titled The Good Wife. Most of it was free verse, with misshapen sentences. What caught my eye was the name of the author – Corvus vagabunda. That’s Latin for ‘the vagabond crow’, as any enthusiastic birdwatcher would know.
“It wasn’t a heteronym, like Pessoa’s many heteronyms, no. It was
just a pseudonym. I had to distance myself from the ideas that I was writing
about. They were still very much my ideas; I was just forced to distance myself
from them.
“I hadn’t written anything since my marriage. I just
couldn’t write, because every time I sat down to write, I imagined my husband
reading what I was writing, and more often than not, I knew that it would hurt
him, or sadden him – or at the very least, affect him. I did not want that. But
I couldn’t just keep all these thoughts and characters bottled up inside; it
was maddening; I would’ve burst, PHURFFF!! Gone mad! And so, the vagabond crow
– the brazen profligate given to blasphemy; who held nothing sacred, mocked
everything; who reveled in the unspeakable.”
Dreams
of Infidelity
Travelling back to her husband
after a month in the field she dreams
of infidelity
these aren’t the dreams of her youth
of promiscuity
when she dreamt of places
of villages full of
clean young men
courteous and well
built
interested in her
cl*t
Now she would stand back and politely ask
the newfound friend
do you wanna kiss?”
And some of the poems were pleasantly
startling, to say the least. I claim to be a writer these days, and this looked
like a story worth following up. So, I contacted the publishers and got hold of
an address in a small town in coastal Kerala only to be told that she’d moved.
That address got me a phone number though, which turned out be that of a niece
living in London, who gave me her e-mail address.
“The Good Wife came much
later. It was a collection of poems that I wrote over the next couple of years.
To begin with I was writing short stories, putting strange names to people and
places around me to write about incidents that took place in my own life. I was
writing strictly ‘pure fiction’.
“I wrote about death, depression, alcoholism – all morbid stuff, really – and how love can trap us. I did not want fame, or recognition. Those were youthful ideas that I’d long outgrown; now I just wanted to write, to put things into words, and thus into perspective. I wanted to be able to stand back and look at my own life and understand it.”
Maybe I Don’t Understand Love
the saddest part is that he knows
deep
down
I
think
that he’s wasting his life
for nothing
they gave birth to me
how
can I just leave them to die?
who will take care of them
if not I ?
but it’s obvious in his smile
at times
the martyr’s choice
after he’s consoled his mother
and put her to bed
or brought his father home from the wedding reception
yet
again
drunk
I never forgot that she loved me
even when she did, said liz murray
he hates her
at times
like when she’s been taking her medication
and
is fine
and calls him names
and then he says the
meanest things
about her
to me
I’ve learnt not to respond with anything
but the kindest words then
for tomorrow
or
the day after
or the day after that
he will forget these times
and remember
that he loves his mother
and also that I said mean things about her
It was a crisp winter day,
with furrows of cirrus far away in a blue sky. No one answered, and so I went
in, latching the little gate behind me. The courtyard was paved over with
ancient-looking flagstones, one of which had a depression, like a mortar. A
little path led away from between the side of the house and the large shed
stacked high with firewood, to a cowshed behind. There were some terraced
fields to the side, hemmed in by tall trees and thick bamboo. The chickens
shuffled away, raising dust in their wake that shone in the late afternoon
winter sun.
“The very first piece that I wrote was actually an interview with
this character, the pseudonym, who would from then on do all my inconvenient
writing for me. It was about how I met Corvus
vagabunda, the wandering crow.
“I used to travel a lot then, and I had this loud,
awkward way of writing dark, morbid stuff; so, I thought the name was quite
apt. I remember I’d initially thought of making him a man, but then the mental
gymnastics required to switch all the genders around him made me settle for a
woman.
“It was liberating. I could finally write about my
true feelings, about how I actually felt. I could discover how I truly felt. And then I realized that some ideas just
sounded better coming from her.”
The Good Wife
so many poems
pledging undying
love
lamenting unrequited
love
mourning love
lost forever
where are the poems
living love
they lived happily ever after
sure. but how?
like jack gilbert’s poem about how
courage is not
the momentary madness but the steadfast evenness
day after day
year after year
an equal music even
even the books on child rearing
are almost poetic
when they say
you
will feel like flinging the baby out the window
but
the impulse will pass
you will still be the loving mother
same as ever
or even more so
where is the poetry of marriage?
that says
you
will feel like having a goddamned fling
but the impulse will pass
and you will still be the loving wife
same as ever
or some such thing
I found her working in the fields, her curly salt-and-pepper hair tied back hastily with a rag. She stood up, with a huge radish she’d just pulled out still in her hand, her eyes crinkling up as she squinted at me, the hints of a smile already at her lips. Then she saw the book I was holding out, more like a shield than a visiting card, and a smile of recognition broke through, sending deep furrows all the way down her cheeks.
“I got away with it for quite a while before my husband got
suspicious. He saw all this correspondence with publishers and editors and
nothing coming out of it. But we’d been together long enough by then and he
knew me; so it wasn’t long before he came to terms with it. He even came up
with a little doggerel:
“Poetry, a mistress most unforgiving
consuming hearts for a living
ruining writers and their lives
and those of their hunbands/ wives
“A part of me knew that love was important, but
another part – the more interesting part, perhaps – knew that poetry was, well,
life. My pseudonym helped be bridge the gap. It helped me come back to my
poetry; and through that, closer to myself.
Not me
never do I feel connected to me
on waking up in the morning however
tenuously
sometimes I pause in the middle of my chores
and looking down upon my hands don’t
recognize them
whose could they be?
thin wrists fingers brittle their
motives unknown their master
anonymous can they be linked
justifiably to
me?
somnambulatorily
for days
on end I walk around
my thoughts
meandering through the crowds’
eroding no bank
upsetting no
soul no one
occasionally rethinking morality and my being only to disavow it
neatly putting it away never to be
exhumed feeling
eerily
like I’m not myself
but
someone
else
A madness, surely.
What does one live for? It used to be a question to muse about at leisure, an abstract philosophical query that I could take up as and when the fancy took me. But of late it’s acquired trappings more somber. The transformation, though a gradual one, is now pressing: its urgency brought on by the madness. And the madness didn’t take me by surprise either, it is like a disease whose relentless advance you can witness but do nothing about.
We
lead a dual existence. Within us, thrive the person who lives, and the person
who watches. There is the actor, the I, who acts out his part; and there’s
the lone observer in the audience, the eye,
the thinker. We can go about our daily
lives without much thought, just live it out practically – work, laugh,
socialize, sleep. That’s how we strive to live, with some sense of the
familiar, some semblance of a routine; it’s easier on the brain. And then every
once in a while, we seem to stop and think about our lives, about events, about
things said or done, or maybe the larger picture, about where we’re going; that
is the stock-taking.
We
are born into a world that is in a state of tumultuous flux. But a limited
exposure, coupled with an overwhelming sense of wonder that that miniscule
snapshot stirs within us, leads us to assume – at least initially – that the
world has always been the way it is. This is just one of the many illusions
that we are born burdened with; born as we are into a web, an elaborate
tapestry of ideas and ideals, of insecurities and boundaries, of beliefs and
principles that we are woven into until they shackle us and tie us down.
But
we revel in this confinement for it puts us at ease. We could go our entire life
and not think beyond the immediate actions of the actor.
We
see other people living out their lives, and these are the standards we seek to
match, the ideals we try to emulate. We collect purses, shoes, books, houses,
people, papers, places, experiences, birds, trees, kilometers, reps, peaks,
songs, bikes, guns, rocks, coins, whatever our group considers important, whatever
it values, whatever can keep us from thinking.
Perhaps
the immensity of space and time, when dwelt upon, is too terrifying; the
possibilities in the absolute absence of definite limits too daunting and so we
shun it. Instead, we seek comfort in the familiar, occasionally dwelling upon questions
like, ‘what does one live for?’ before retreating to a life we are accustomed
to. Maybe thought is unnecessary, and it’s best to be just the actor. It is a
possibility. But sadly, the process is irreversible. Once you’ve stepped onto
the path of thought, it grabs you by the hair and drags you on, and then
there’s no going back, especially if you have the madness.
In a story my father sometimes told me,
a holy man visiting a wicked landlord blessed him with a settled life and
cursed a kindly farmer to a life of wandering. Perhaps it was two villages and
not two people, but I forget. The idea, anyhow, was that the wicked landlord’s
malice be contained while the kind farmer’s benevolence spread far and wide. I
don’t remember if I found the idea of the farmer’s involuntary sacrifice noble
at the time, since a settled life is what constitutes happiness for most, and
all a farmer would pray for, in story after story, was that the seasons keep
turning, the rains be plentiful and the crop, good.
I often went back to the story and at
some point, began to wonder if the holy man had been getting at something that
the storytellers missed. Maybe what he wanted for the farmer was not a forced
sacrifice, but in fact, a better life. Perhaps Chatwin is right, that we were
meant to be wanderers, and settling down ruined it all. Forced out of our
comfort zones we would begin to think, and in thought would we come alive.
It
comes in bouts, this madness. Like hunger. And poetry. For I don’t think the
body can survive sustained exertion. I wake up in the morning and check, like
for a cold or a bad throat, for symptoms of it. Maybe it is a disease, caused by some parasitic bacteria that would stand to
gain immensely in reproductive fitness if I die unknown in some distant land. And
like the rabid dog manipulated into biting and thus infecting his victim, I too
must seek out the destiny that awaits me, my fate, maneuvered by the madness.
There
is a liver fluke that infests the guts of cattle. It’s life cycle passes
through a snail and an ant. The ant bits a blade of grass and is suspended
upside down, waiting to be ingested by the cow.
One
of the symptoms – or maybe it is the effect – of the madness is a shift in the
weights attached to pros and cons. Most decisions in life, like which road to
take at a fork, for instance, are made by a value-judgment. We attach weights
to the pros and cons associated with each road and then choose the one that
comes out on top. These weights, though seemingly objective, are nothing but
our subjective perceptions and feelings: they are emotions externalized,
projected to future events and predicted as best as can be; and mistakes of
judgment occur when we misjudge the weights.
Emotions,
though, are not absolute even in their subjectivity. Feelings neither. What
pleases me today might not tomorrow, and that is because I change. All of us do, we constantly change. Emotions and feelings
draw upon my current worldview, my perspective, my set of beliefs. However, we
are fine with most of our decisions because these changes are gradual and
though we may be very different people in ten years’ time, we are more or less
ok from day to day. The coherence of our lives enables us to make sense of our
decisions.
This
is where the madness comes in, wreaking havoc. It causes the weights to change
dramatically by drastically shifting perspectives and worldviews. With this
shift in the framework, one is left floundering for a stable point of reference,
an infallible truth that one can rely upon. For instance, when faced by a
certain choice, the decisions a settled farmer with a family would make will be
very different from the decisions made by a wandering mendicant. And they can
both justify their respective decisions to themselves. But what happens when
the farmer goes to sleep having made a decision and wakes up in the rough robe
of the wanderer, staff in hand?
He
can then quote Sartre. “Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all.
There is no trace of it anymore. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me
quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them. I am quite at ease
this evening, quite solidly terre-a-terre in the world.”
And
thus it is that I now seek an answer to that old question that now has
immediate relevance; that is now so practical and real. It is supposed to
provide me with a framework within which to think.
What
is it that one lives for?
I often think of my life as a book I’d
like to read; a life less ordinary. But then I run the danger of choosing for
my future, the past of famous dead men. Did I say that or did Kazantzakis? I
wouldn’t put it beyond myself to simply want a life that is tragic. Why I want
this is hard to say. A simple answer I often think of is that that’s what gets
the poetry going. Why is poetry important? Well, what else is there to life
anyway, but poetry?
Because next to travel, and often
alongside it, art is the only real marker of life that I think is worth anything.
I may be mistaken, but it is through travel and art that I consider my days
well spent.
And happiness is but fleeting, it is
sorrow that is deep. It’s almost as if I would like to actively work towards
making my life a tragedy. The actor in pain would give the thinker
food for thought. The actor living a battered life will ensure that the thinker
leads a sublime existence. When you force yourself awake early in the morning,
the groggy actor is miserable, but the observer in you revels in that miniscule
suffering. I want to let the actor grapple with the meanest of circumstances
until he is broken, lash him until the lacerated flesh yields up something
inspiring.
The
observer is beginning to wrest control over the actor as the bouts of madness
get longer, bigger, more ominous. The only thing that holds me back is the
ever-diminishing voice that says, this
too shall pass: it is but a passing bout of madness.
But
what if it leaves in its wake an altered landscape that I don’t recognize anymore?
What if the coherence oh my existence actually snaps? Or worse yet, what if I’m
stuck forever between the two worlds? Imagine the cracked freeze of the moment when you are able to hold the two
discordant perspectives simultaneously: the farmer and the wanderer merging at
the frontiers of thought. It is a terrifying place, the mind.
Sometimes
I feel the entire burden of a lifetime’s worth of thoughts weighing me down and
I don’t even recognize them as mine; and I wonder what it’s all about.
The burden of feeling, says
Pessoa, the burden of having to feel.
At times In bouts
I have this and in tides
irrepressible urge my wretched heart connives
says
the farmer to the mendicant to
his fields to his bowl to
just get up and leave make a seed of my soul
leave everything behind and seek send my guts down as roots
out my destiny. to breathe into the soil and grow us food
in experiences and spew as the seasons come and go
out songs that'll leave you in the garden that we sow
all breath and water
