“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
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