Healing verses

If all the lands and legacies in Southasia smelled of democracy, poetry in Southasia would undoubtedly be limp and sodden. While Nepal has striven to become a true Naya Nepal, work by the Nepali poet Manu Manjil paints an uninviting and foreboding Kathmandu that has yet to shrug off its tortured past:

Don't come, I said
The city abounds in troubles
Streets here stab and shock
The dream walker's steps…
The city, I said, is ungenerous to life…

Manu shares portraits of his Kathmandu screaming as day breaks, crows perched on its shoulders, of his being half-awakened to write. The anguish of this poet, who watches the disappointments of his country in transition and has trouble looking straight into the mirror, is engraved in his poetry.

I met Manjil at the SAARC Poetry Festival of Young Poets, which took place in February in several cities in Orissa – Bhubaneswar, Puri, Konark and Cuttack. He and I and the rest of the individuals that made up this roving festival were all traversing hundreds of miles to indulge ourselves in the many variants of current Southasian lyricism. Among us were inspired young poets, all of whom offer gifts to the region.

Nightingales by night
One was a young man in his 30s, a manager with an insurance company in Orissa. Almost the minute that we stepped into the Bhubaneswar auditorium for the first time, Soubhagyanta Maharana was handing out his English translations of Jayanta Mahapatra:   Ah! Around me is a crowded procession

Of corpses with firebrands,
Demanding their right to live
Amidst the strange din of skeletons

By the time the notes of the last line of this prescient poem began fading, Ajeet Caur, one of the organisers, had begun her address, mentioning the vicious 'roadmaps' of commerce that she said had marred the 'tender tracks' of literature. Next up was Sitakanta Mahapatra, the eminent Oriya poet, who spoke of having chased the bird of poetry for four decades. After the Governor of Orissa, Murlidhar Chandrakant Bhandare, concluded the inauguration, I recited a poem of my own:   I am an Eve off the fast lane,

With a huge price tag teasing the freshly packaged: 'I'
Humbled by house rules,
Labeled: 'TO GO',
Unless I am too slow for the season,
Unless my colors are no more right for people or profit,
Unless I end up burdening the inventory level,
After all, it is the season for lean retailing,
I can't be overstaying my shelf life.   

A Southasian woman is indeed chained to her own demons. She is indeed hinged to the old doors of patriarchy, which have allowed no woman to exit from the private to the public. My sentiments found an instant echo in the words of Karnataka-based Bharathi Devi, a schoolteacher by day and nightingale by night:   When the pressure cooker hoots

When mustard bursts in the burning oil
When milk boils over the vessel…
And when those dreams seek a space to paint their riot of shades
The desire to have a room of my own
Swells within me.

The next gift was brought by Calcutta-based Srebanti Ghosh, whose impassioned verses, with their explicit eroticism, stirred the listeners. Soon after her first recitation, the crowd fell deprecatingly silence. Yet Ghosh was fearless:   This house smells only of males, even the chomrie,

The old mattress, also the batasa for homage
…The male incarnated pillars, the Natamandir, the iron door,
Those helots hiding at the end of the stairs, state and foul,
Fed on leftovers…   

An absence of anxiety over audience reaction likewise marks the work of Satchin Ketkar, a young lecturer at Baroda University. Ketkar, who also writes about the forbidden with ease, was applauded for his poem on the 12th-century eroticism graphically etched on the Sun Temple in Puri. Asked whether he feared readers' responses, his instant response hit home: "Only poets read poetry, don't they?" They do, indeed, and for this reason Ketkar's "Spam" had a gripping effect:   My Norton protected soul

Proves toothless to retaliate
Like some mutant fish
Struggling on a hook  

And, because a poet appreciates poetry, Angshuman Kar from Calcutta instantly touched my own feelings of the mundane-ness of absurdity:  

1996:

BPL. Large. Color set. When purchased for home, for the first time I began thinking we're also getting rich-men-like. Sourav's century I saw, Anaida's album, films on Star Movies. Mom became an addict, a movie worm of various serials, but Dad only of cricket and old films on Zee cinema – of the sixtees-seventees – the Hindi films with dishoom-dushoom.

2000:
Dad passed away.   

Good spirits and bad hearts

A poet friend had said earlier that Southasia suffers from perennial bouts of bipolarism. Even while bombs are dropped, we celebrate survival. Here, guns and roses, rags and riches, fair and foul all live in harmony. And so, while lovers make love, Venilla, a young poet from Tamil Nadu, observed: "A tremor…/ Mating ends in smoke."  

Anar, a young Muslim woman, had flown in from Sri Lanka, paid for her own fare and lodging to come to India to read her poetry. The 22 long years of conflict drove her to write about the bloodbath in her land:  

I am habituated
to the sight of blood
shed every month. Yet,
when the child comes screaming
with his finger, slashed,
I shudder in shock and suffering.   

Then came the great Oriya poet Jayanta Mahapatra himself, quoting the Nepali Laxmi Prasad – "Let me rise higher than the sage" – and al-Mahmud, from Bangladesh – "I cry as these birds cry." Mahapatra expressed his opinion that a poet was not a social reformer; that, in spite of the undiscovered graves, imprisonments and killings, what holds true 60 years down the road are the poets' spirits, their hearts all gone bad due to injustice. Indeed, his words held true in our immediate forum: all 64 of us, from all over Southasia, were busy sealing our bonds with casual cards, hugs and courtesy and desperately looking for entry into each other's 'bad hearts'.   Our hearts go bad with the discriminating brush strokes of nation-state narratives, which alienate our lands from legacies and imprison us through separated frontiers. By the time I left Bhubaneswar, I decided to write about the embattled borders in Bangla, my own tongue, the stream in which my inner reflections flow:  

Kobey jano ami amakey charlam
Aka holo kobey jano tumi and bhumi
Bhashon ar Bhossho  

When was it that I had slipped into my shadow?
When was it that you were painted in your own land amidst rhetoric and ruin?  

Yet for all those discriminating brushstrokes that divide, there are also bridges. Shortly after the festival, on the first of Baisakh, the new Maitree Express resumed rail service, after 43 years of empty tracks, between Dhaka and Calcutta. It will connect travellers between India and Bangladesh, but the spirit is one that speaks to all of Southasia. And, like poetry, more such links might even mend a few hearts broken by our respective governments.