The deep emotions of the Indian/American immigrant

G. S. Sharat Chandra

G.S. Sharat Chandra (1935-2000) was an internationally acclaimed author of both poetry and fiction. Much of his work touches on the deep emotions of the Indian/American immigrant.
Indian-born Chandra received a law degree in India but came to the United States in the 1960s to become a writer. He received his Masters of Fine Arts form the Iowa Writers Workshop. For most of his career, Chandra taught at the University of Missouri-Kansas City as a professor of Creative Writing and English (1983-2000). His most famous work, Family of Mirrors, was a 1993 Pulitzer Prize nominee for poetry. Author of ten books, including translations from Sanskrit and English into the Indian language Kannada, a former Fulbright Fellow and recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing, Chandra has given readings at the Library of Congress, Oxford, and McDaid's Pub in Dublin.

Chandra traveled the world extensively throughout his life and received international recognition for both his poetry and fiction. His works have appeared in many journals including American Poetry Review, London Magazine, The Nation, and Partisan Review.
Chandra was married to his wife, Jane for 38 years until he died of a brain aneurysm in 2000. He left three children.
Some of his poems
Shortchanged Lives
"You from India? Dreadfully poor place,
I was there for three weeks,
saw a dead boy on the street,"
gasps Mrs. Gentry,
sizing me with squinted eyes
as if to give more lens might tempt me
to dive into her yuppie life.
How can I tell her
I've nursed the starved, the forsaken,

or those on a parched afternoon,
that give up under a thin tree
or the shade of a culvert,
hallucinating a winged charpoy
to whisk them to swarga,
where gods line up
with handfuls of bliss to make up
for their battered mortality.

Brother
Last night I arrived
a few minutes
before the storm,
on the lake the waves slow,
a gray froth cresting.
Again and again the computer voice said
you were disconnected
while the wind rattled
the motel sign outside my room
to gather
its nightlong arctic howl,
like an orphan moaning in sleep
for words in the ceaseless
pelting of sleet,

the night falling
to hold a truce with the dark
In the Botticellian stillness
of a clear dawn I drove
by the backroads to your house,
autumn leaves like a school of yellow tails
hitting the windshield
in a ceremony of bloodletting.

Your doorbell rang hollow,
I peered through the glass door,
for a moment I thought
my reflection was you
on the other side,
staring back,
holding hands to my face.

It was only the blurred hold of memory
escaping through a field of glass.

Under the juniper bush
you planted when your wife died,
I found the discarded sale sign,

and looked for a window
where you'd prove me wrong
signaling to say
it was all a bad joke.

As I head back, I see the new
owners, pale behind car windows
driving to your house,
You're gone who knows where,
sliced into small portions
in the aisles of dust and memory.

Morning Song

To turn the lamp on,
let it capture the cunning back
of the literary thief,

to open the window
so the birds learn their words
instead of muddling them with chirps,

to whistle to the deaf horse grazing
in the windy backyard,
see in its steamy nostrils
the angelic clouds,

to stash the householder's concern
for this world in a trash bag
& applaud its disappearance
as if in an act at a carnival
to forgive those more able
to hold on to their daily pretensions
even as they wake from dreams.
O life, that settles into recesses
of sorrow in the company of others,
forgive this foolish human
who chooses what he doesn't know
of coming deceptions,
then dances with them
in a garage full of leaves.

The Absent
Bells do not ring when our names are called,

we are the no people
who were once the yes people,
we are China in the back closet,
wash left in the rain
with the wind moving our sex.

Our words are awkward
between forks and knives,
between shadows
on the dinner plates,
we're stones fluttering
in your intimate eyes.

Yet you've given us
a place at your table,
it's a tight place
between crowded chairs,
naked we do not know
if you have us here
to keep yourselves separate.

Barbers of Nanjangud

In Nanjangud
there are five hair cutting salons
named after the goddess of India
with the picture of the goddess
inset with circular photos
of Gandhi, Nehru, Subhash. Bhose,
hovering over the curvature
of the globe with India in the middle.

In one hand the goddess holds the national flag,
with the other she blesses
everyone who bows their heads
for hair-cut, shampoo or blow-dry.

But business is slack,
young men have taken to wearing their hair
longer than women or modem saints,
pilgrims are scarce,
there's drought in the air.

The five barbers sit
vacantly in their chairs.
They're bald, wear no dentures,
bet on horses in far away races
after consulting the race guide,
town tout, the astrologer,
finally the goddess on the wall
in whose moving smile
they divine the well groomed horse
that'll make up for their business loss.

Midlife

I want a vacation
where the mind doesn’t stray
from the starry stratosphere
of motel ceilings
to remember it's become a whale
dipping in & out of itself.

I want to bounce on the bed
from the first kiss
to the last hurrah,
to collapse without pit stops
back into the body
without backing into memory.

I want my mouth
not to watch my tongue,
my tongue my words,
my words my brain,
the rage that was relevant
only yesterday
which now makes me say
I'm glad I've lost it.

I want to dream
of youth's cocky impieties,
the inexact ways to your love's certainty,
not this vision of oranges
under the bed,
the world waiting to see
if I get to eat them free.

Waking At Fifty

Show me a man who sleeps to be miserable,
I'll show you myself
the story isn't easy,
grown into my own soliloquy
I've become a face beside a face
waiting for the ferry.
I tell myself it's all right,
all faces become one
in their fall after fifty:
others gone ahead will offer tea
between wakefulness
and a good deal of forgetting.
I wake up to a bed half empty.
My lover of last night
has become mother downstairs
in a conspiracy of children
who think birthdays are fun
for someone who seems undone.
Down the stairs I pretend not to remember
the lantern that flashed red
by the gates of my clear dream,
Charon's hooded whistle,
the silent boat rocking alone,
all hands blossoming into waves,
for those love gathered downstairs
are giggling with ribbons,
ask if I slept well,
do I remember it's May?
My daughters give me candy bars,
my son shaving brush, face mask,
my wife, hair growing treatmentÑ
gifts that a middle aged man
must truly needÑ
sweetness, clear conscience,
the pardonable chance
to believe in miracles.
Stillness The hours,
sullen goats grazing on emptiness
drift mutely to the other side of day.
The sun has cast his mid-day net
but doesn't move
to pull in the catchÑ
a chameleon,
two stink bugs stiff after love,
a towhee dozing over the patch of impatiens.
Stillness is making its point,
knowing this
the wind plays dead.

Sraddha

A Hindu ceremony where crow
believed to be ancestors are fed
My brothers and sisters are calling
our ancestors from their hideout
in heaven where
they wait dead or denied,
mortally reminiscing
on the good food they ate,
until they grow wings
to sneak back as ravens.
It must be the smell itself
that gives them directions
to homes of relatives
who're cooking the burden.
A fat one eats only rice,
another pecks on pickles,
one grumbles about the cook,
another perches praising a niece
whose recipes came from a book.
A foreign dead asks for knives,
another circles the house
cawing directions
to a flock of frenetic wives.
Fed by the scriptures,
my ancestors
still remain unimpressed:
a burly beak declares flatly
my wife's curry is a sorry mess.
The last one to leave is a lecher,
sighs at my wife's sumptuous look,
signals he'll be back later,
for favors off the hook.

Valley of the Crows, India

At the sudden edge
where the hill gapes into the valley,
a gnarled mimosa leans
away from the sky
to shade a heap of pebbles,
a raven sits cleaning its beak,
its eyes ancient as guilt.
Without much sympathy
boyish waiters tell the story:
a paltry priest, his orthodox wife,
and lonely daughter
took care of the temple nearby.
It was a worthless living
between bosoms of crippled gods.
There was famine,
pilgrims went elsewhere
where gods flourished
under influential care.
The daughter grew like a lush vine
through the crevices of poverty,
a rich man took her,
ashamed, the mother led
the pregnant girl to the valley,
jumped together arms spread,
it was windless,
no one heard a cry or prayer.
When the crows were done,
no one could find the scattered bones,
the priest went deranged,
rang the temple bells for days
as if to ask the ravens.
The hill is now a tourist resort
where week-end revellers
sit drinking cold beer,
listening to the past held
in the gyrating postures
of waiters who are also guides
to the temple kept intact
with its tragedies.
I among them,
and the raven which slaps
its groomed wings in memory.

Exile

We have everything
telephones, TV, schedules for readings,
addresses, invitations,
but we circle our chairs,
ask aimless questions
who was the angel at the airport
singing names on the intercom
as if she were calling us?
Why are we shouting
our names into mirrors,
awake in a dream
where sirens draw near?
Women sit close
all evening under lamps
to read what we wrote
lost in their country.
Our hands are empty,
our words roam in the city.
Even our rooms are shaped
like boats
to make us buoyant,
yet we drift without docks,
our heads are numbers
bobbing on the streets,
in between the lights,
words are raindrops on our fists.
You can throw anything into the sea,
the sea opens,
the sea zips itself back.
In the strange buildings,
hosted by linguists
we seek walls to hold us steady,
let our ghosts converse.

?
After the Earthquake in India
(30 September 1993)

it's a habit by now
head bent
at four a.m., the birds wake
to complain

they do this cackling in
forgotten dialects of the poor

yesterday's count was thirty-one-thousand
as if longing for more

the morning news will bring
more bodies to the surface

counting is one way
of thinning the eye
to a diet of faith

someone says if there's divine justice
it favors solid foundations

mud & rock slip through God's fingers

we can discuss this at length

but if prayers are shouts
pain is the lost argument

Eye for the obscure things

Anjum Hasan

Anjum Hasan is an Indian poet and novelist. She was born in Shillong, Meghalaya and currently lives in Bangalore, Karnataka, India where she works for India Foundation for the Arts. 'Street on the Hill' (Sahitya Akademi, 2006)was her debut collection of poems about Shillong and her childhood experiences in the hill town.Her debut novel Lunatic in my Head (Zubaan-Penguin, 2007) was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award 2007. Set in Shillong, a picturesque hill-station in north-east India, in the early 1990s, the novel weaves together the stories of its three main characters, ranging from an IAS aspirant who is obsessed with Pink Floyd to a college teacher struggling to complete her PhD and yet longing to find love. The novel has been described by Siddhartha Deb as 'haunting and lyrical' and as acquiring a 'critical intensity'

Her next novel titled Neti, Neti which is in progress, was longlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize. She has also contributed essays and articles to the Hindu Literary Supplement, Outlook, the Deccan Herald, Little Magazine and many other journals and newspapers.

Some of her poems
Neighbourhood

On the narrow steps leading
to our gate, the pakoriwallah from Bihar is often found
kissing an anonymous woman at night.

Amazing act. My parents switch off the sitting-room
lights whenever this happens. The car beams show
them up – one unbroken secret silhouette.

The steps invite other actions. The local fakir some-
times lies there, coloured like a ditch, and passers-by
might climb to have a better look at the orange trees.

But this is different. The soft-spoken pakoriwallah
smelling of his pakoris , his half hour island of
defiant passion on the steps of somebody's house,

while around him everyday: the brash freeloaders,
the kick in the groin, the familiar words of abuse
spoken in an unfamiliar language.

Mawlai

For seventeen years we passed through Mawlai in a bus —
saw waxy red flowers in the pomegranate trees and a man
pegging brilliant white napkins on a clothesline against the wind.
We didn’t live there and those who lived there didn’t care about
the buses passing through at all times of the day, right up against the
mauve beef hanging in its pockets of fat, and the shops with shiny strips
of tobacco showing through shadows, and the new houses and the
old houses where the same sort of people lived, or at least that’s
how we felt, passing through in buses for seventeen years.
But we won’t be doing it anymore — looking out of a window
at a patch of maize in its copper earth, eggs in a wire basket,
hand-painted signs near open doorways that remind us
of sunlit drawings in children’s books about places that grow
sad in their unreality with every passing year, simple signs in
white paint — hangne ngi die tiar, hangne ngi suh jainsem.
We’ll forget what they looked like, the rough golden clapboard shops
with their unwrapped cakes of soap, the windows in houses no
bigger than a man’s handkerchief, and it will be difficult to remember
where each of the cherry trees stood because they flowered so briefly
before lapsing back into their dark green anonymity.
The graveyard on a gentle slope, the fence weighed down with roses!
We’ll want to urgently tell someone, if we ever happen to return,
that we knew this place, passed through it in a bus for seventeen years,
but having said that we won’t know what else to say about Mawlai
because we never really got off there or bought things from its shops
or stepped into someone’s boiled-vegetables-smelling house
to watch the street through netted curtains. We’ll keep quiet then
and try to ignore that sense which is not pain but has pain’s cloudiness
and its regret and its way of going and returning.

Small Town

The man who runs the sports goods store
that also sells old unopened books and
board games in faded boxes, sits with his
tattooed arms folded in the sun.
He drinks a lot of beer and doesn’t ask
stupid questions. His friends loiter
around small music shops all morning,
in slippers, with their shirt-tails out.
The distant air lights up the furrowed edges
of the hills. Sometimes he wants to describe
the smell of brown oaks ageing in the sun
and bakeries where boys in dirty aprons
lit their ovens in the early summer morning.
But the tattooed man dozes on when
his friends talk and the sun whitens the spines
of pale detective novels and books full of
blond-bodied girls and cross-stitch designs.
When a man is killed in the afternoon,
knifed and left to die with his face down
in a drain, the tattooed fellow has an opinion.
But he shuts the door and sleeps on a wooden
plank behind the counter that smells of cigarettes
and stale tea, till rain cools the streets. All the
farthest sounds of the city wake him up slowly,
till he hears the rain on his own window
and thinks of the dirty water running below
the dead man’s face.
In the evening when the rain lets up for a bit
his friends might return and joke about it.
He switches on the lights at five. People drift in
With damp trouser-cuffs and notice the Chinese
dragons on his arms. They talk and again the cool
air outlines each noisy car and softened tree.
It’s Saturday. He rests his elbows on the cracked
glass counter and watches a girl across the street,
scrubbing a couple of neat stone steps till they
gleam in the clear blue evening.

To The Chinese Restaurant
for Daisy

We come in here from the long afternoon
stretched over the town’s sloping roofs,
its greasy garages and ice-cream parlours,
its melancholic second-hand bookshops
with their many missing pages.Life’s not moving.
We sit at a red table, among the dragons,
near the curtained-off street-facing windows
with their months’ old orangeade.
Out in the streets there are schoolboys with
their ties askew and the garish fruit-sellers.
We eat more than we need to. We eat
so that our boredom’s no longer dangerous,
so that from the comfort of soup,
with the minor pleasures of chopsuey,
we can fend off the memory of cities unvisited,
unknown and unknowable affairs,
people with never-fading lipstick and
confident gestures who we will never be.
One day soon we’ll be running,
our lives will be like the blur seen from a bus,
and we won’t read each other’s letters thrice.
But right there we’re young, we count
our money carefully, we laugh so hard
and drop our forks.
We are plucked from sadness there
in that little plastic place with the lights
turned low, the waiters stoned from doing nothing,
the smells of ketchup and eternally frying oni

G.S. Sharat Chandra

G.S. Sharat Chandra (1935-2000) was an internationally acclaimed author of both poetry and fiction. Much of his work touches on the deep emotions of the Indian/ American immigrant. Indian-born Chandra received a law degree in India but came to the United States in the 1960s to become a writer. He received his Masters of Fine Arts form the Iowa Writers Workshop. For most of his career, Chandra taught at the University of Missouri-Kansas City as a professor of Creative Writing and English (1983-2000). His most famous work, Family of Mirrors, was a 1993 Pulitzer Prize nominee for poetry. Author of ten books, including translations from Sanskrit and English into the Indian language Kannada, a former Fulbright Fellow and recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing, Chandra has given readings at the Library of Congress, Oxford, and McDaid's Pub in Dublin.
Chandra traveled the world extensively throughout his life and received international recognition for both his poetry and fiction. His works have appeared in many journals including American Poetry Review, London Magazine, The Nation, and Partisan Review.
Chandra was married to his wife, Jane for 38 years until he died of a brain aneurysm in 2000. He left three children
Some of his poems
Brother
Last night I arrived
a few minutes
before the storm,
on the lake the waves slow,
a gray froth cresting.
Again and again the computer voice said
you were disconnected
while the wind rattled
the motel sign outside my room
to gather
its nightlong arctic howl,
like an orphan moaning in sleep
for words in the ceaseless
pelting of sleet,

the night falling
to hold a truce with the dark

In the Botticellian stillness
of a clear dawn I drove
by the backroads to your house,
autumn leaves like a school of yellow tails
hitting the windshield
in a ceremony of bloodletting.

Your doorbell rang hollow,
I peered through the glass door,
for a moment I thought
my reflection was you
on the other side,
staring back,
holding hands to my face.

It was only the blurred hold of memory
escaping through a field of glass.

Under the juniper bush
you planted when your wife died,
I found the discarded sale sign,

and looked for a window
where you'd prove me wrong
signaling to say
it was all a bad joke.

As I head back, I see the new
owners, pale behind car windows
driving to your house,

You're gone who knows where,
sliced into small portions

in the aisles of dust and memory.

Morning Song

To turn the lamp on,
let it capture the cunning back
of the literary thief,

to open the window
so the birds learn their words
instead of muddling them with chirps,

to whistle to the deaf horse grazing
in the windy backyard,
see in its steamy nostrils
the angelic clouds,

to stash the householder's concern
for this world in a trash bag
& applaud its disappearance
as if in an act at a carnival

to forgive those more able
to hold on to their daily pretensions
even as they wake from dreams.

O life, that settles into recesses
of sorrow in the company of others,

forgive this foolish human
who chooses what he doesn't know
of coming deceptions,

then dances with them
in a garage full of leaves.

The Absent

Bells do not ring
when our names are called,

we are the no people
who were once the yes people,
we are China in the back closet,
wash left in the rain
with the wind moving our sex.

Our words are awkward
between forks and knives,
between shadows
on the dinner plates,
we're stones fluttering
in your intimate eyes.

Yet you've given us
a place at your table,
it's a tight place
between crowded chairs,
naked we do not know
if you have us here
to keep yourselves separate.

Barbers of Nanjangud

In Nanjangud
there are five hair cutting salons
named after the goddess of India
with the picture of the goddess
inset with circular photos
of Gandhi, Nehru, Subhash. Bhose,
hovering over the curvature
of the globe with India in the middle.

In one hand the goddess holds the national flag,
with the other she blesses
everyone who bows their heads
for hair-cut, shampoo or blow-dry.

But business is slack,
young men have taken to wearing their hair
longer than women or modem saints,
pilgrims are scarce,
there's drought in the air.

The five barbers sit
vacantly in their chairs.
They're bald, wear no dentures,
bet on horses in far away races
after consulting the race guide,
town tout, the astrologer,
finally the goddess on the wall in whose moving smile
they divine the well groomed horse
that'll make up for their business loss.

Midlife

I want a vacation
where the mind doesn’t stray
from the starry stratosphere
of motel ceilings
to remember it's become a whale
dipping in & out of itself.

I want to bounce on the bed
from the first kiss
to the last hurrah,
to collapse without pit stops
back into the body
without backing into memory.

I want my mouth
not to watch my tongue,
my tongue my words,
my words my brain,
the rage that was relevant
only yesterday
which now makes me say
I'm glad I've lost it.

I want to dream
of youth's cocky impieties,
the inexact ways to your love's certainty,
not this vision of oranges
under the bed,
the world waiting to see
if I get to eat them free.

Waking At Fifty

Show me a man who sleeps to be miserable,
I'll show you myself
the story isn't easy,
grown into my own soliloquy
I've become a face beside a face
waiting for the ferry.
I tell myself it's all right,
all faces become one
in their fall after fifty:
others gone ahead will offer tea
between wakefulness
and a good deal of forgetting.
I wake up to a bed half empty.
My lover of last night
has become mother downstairs
in a conspiracy of children
who think birthdays are fun
for someone who seems undone.
Down the stairs I pretend not to remember
the lantern that flashed red
by the gates of my clear dream,
Charon's hooded whistle,
the silent boat rocking alone,
all hands blossoming into waves,
for those love gathered downstairs
are gigling with ribbons,
ask if I slept well,
do I remember it's May?
My daughters give me candy bars,
my son shaving brush, face mask,
my wife, hair growing treatment
gifts that a middle aged man
must truly needing
sweetness, clear conscience,
the pardonable chance
to believe in miracles.
Stillness The hours,
sullen goats grazing on emptiness
drift mutely to the other side of day.
The sun has cast his mid-day net
but doesn't move
to pull in the catching
a chameleon,
two stink bugs stiff after love,
a towhee dozing over the patch of impatiens.
Stillness is making its point,
knowing this
the wind plays dead.


Sraddha
A Hindu ceremony where crow
believed to be ancestors are fed
My brothers and sisters are calling
our ancestors from their hideout
in heaven where
they wait dead or denied,
mortally reminiscing
on the good food they ate,
until they grow wings
to sneak back as ravens.
It must be the smell itself
that gives them directions
to homes of relatives
who're cooking the burden.
A fat one eats only rice,
another pecks on pickles,
one grumbles about the cook,
another perches praising a niece
whose recipes came from a book.
A foreign dead asks for knives,
another circles the house
cawing directions

to a flock of frenetic wives.
Fed by the scriptures,
my ancestors
still remain unimpressed:
a burly beak declares flatly
my wife's curry is a sorry mess.
The last one to leave is a lecher,
sighs at my wife's sumptuous look,
signals he'll be back later,

for favors off the hook.
Valley of the Crows, India
At the sudden edge
where the hill gapes into the valley,
a gnarled mimosa leans
away from the sky
to shade a heap of pebbles,
a raven sits cleaning its beak,
its eyes ancient as guilt.
Without much sympathy
boyish waiters tell the story:
a paltry priest, his orthodox wife,
and lonely daughter
took care of the temple nearby.
It was a worthless living
between bosoms of crippled gods.
There was famine,
pilgrims went elsewhere
where gods flourished
under influential care.
The daughter grew like a lush vine
through the crevices of poverty,
a rich man took her,
ashamed, the mother led
the pregnant girl to the valley,
jumped together arms spread,
it was windless,
no one heard a cry or prayer.
When the crows were done,
no one could find the scattered bones,
the priest went deranged,
rang the temple bells for days
as if to ask the ravens.
The hill is now a tourist resort
where week-end revellers
sit drinking cold beer,
listening to the past held
in the gyrating postures
of waiters who are also guides
to the temple kept intact
with its tragedies.
I among them,
and the raven which slaps
its groomed wings in memory.
Exile
We have everything
telephones, TV, schedules for readings,
addresses, invitations,
but we circle our chairs,
ask aimless questions
who was the angel at the airport
singing names on the intercom
as if she were calling us?
Why are we shouting
our names into mirrors,
awake in a dream
where sirens draw near?
Women sit close
all evening under lamps
to read what we wrote
lost in their country.
Our hands are empty,
our words roam in the city.
Even our rooms are shaped
like boats
to make us buoyant,
yet we drift without docks,
our heads are numbers
bobbing on the streets,
in between the lights,
words are raindrops on our fists.
You can throw anything into the sea,
the sea opens,
the sea zips itself back.
In the strange buildings,
hosted by linguists
we seek walls to hold us steady,
let our ghosts converse.

?
After the Earthquake in India
(30 September 1993)

it's a habit by now
head bent
at four a.m., the birds wake
to complain

they do this cackling in
forgotten dialects of the poor

yesterday's count was thirty-one-thousand
as if longing for more

the morning news will bring
more bodies to the surface

counting is one way
of thinning the eye
to a diet of faith

someone says if there's divine justice
it favors solid foundations

mud & rock slip through God's fingers

we can discuss this at length

but if prayers are shouts
pain is the lost argument

A poet of rare and finer sensibilities

Arundhathi Subramaniam

Arundhathi Subramaniam is a poet and writer based in Mumbai. She has published two collections of poetry: On Cleaning Bookshelves (Allied, 2001) and Where I Live (Allied, 2005), is the author of a prose study, The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005), and was co-editor of Confronting Love (Penguin, 2005), an anthology of contemporary Indian love poetry in English. Translated into Hindi, Tamil, Italian and Spanish, her poetry has been widely anthologised. She was awarded the Charles Wallace Fellowship at the University of Stirling in 2003.

As well, Subramaniam is a creative consultant at the National Centre for the Performing arts, Bombay; on the committee of the Poetry Circle of Mumbai; editor of the India domain of the Poetry International website, and heads a forum called ´Chauraha´ that promotes dialogue between practitioners of various artistic disciplines.

The Poetry Society hosted Subramaniam in the UK for two weeks (19-30 October 2006) during which she read her own work and discussed contemporary poets of India to a wide audience, in programmed events across the UK.. She has participated in several international poetry festivals and conferences in India and Europe.

Her own work leaps between taking a dynamically philosophical view on immediate daily experiences to skillfully etching cultural or geographical references as compass points to a sweeping emotional landscape. Few poets capture contradictory impulses so convincingly. This unexpected range is what makes Subramaniam’s work such a pleasure to read. You never know what country, mood, streetscape, or relationship you’ll be plunged into but the ferociously intelligent attention to detail ensures that you are given every opportunity to engage with the pure energy of the poem:

and the taste of coffee one day in Lucca
suddenly awakening an old prescription –
Peabury, Plantation A
and fifty grams of chicory
from the fragrant shop near the Kapaleeshwara temple.

As Keki Daruwalla (Kavya Bharati, 2006) says “Subramaniam’s poetry is one of illumination. She flashes a pencil-torchlight on a subject, and suddenly you feel you are the richer for it . . . Even more than precision, what defines her verse is its subtlety and the angle of vision from which she sees life.”

. . . the musky torsos
of football stars, ancient Egypt and Jacques Cousteau’s
lurching empires of the sea, bazaars
in Mughal India, the sacred plunge
into a Cadbury’s Five Star bar, Kanchenjanga,. . .

Jules Mann, Poetry Society, UK

An article on Arundhathi Subramaniam

The Act of Writing Poetry

….Subramaniam writes in English, and is eloquent on the subject of poetry’s – and in particular, English language poetry’s – embattled position within the Indian cultural establishment. Set against the international success of ‘The Great Indian Novel’, and badly positioned to survive “the increasing spirit of cultural nativism sweeping across the country…\which sees the use of English as a reactionary throwback”, she laments the fact that “Indian poetry in English simply doesn’t count” to most people – in particular, to publishers – but also sees embattlement as at least implying “the recognition by the status quo of a potentially unsettling presence”. Although denying the idea of a “coterie” identity or set “criteria” in the Poetry Circle, she remarks that “its abiding collective passion for poetry” has prevented it from being “colonised by the spirit of purely academic enterprise” – “the more valuable contribution…has been the ‘artisanal’ workshop criticism.”

Subramaniam’s own poems are testimony to this sense of the art-form as something which, through a combination of necessity and choice, works quietly in the background, while still insisting on its own significance, and in its own terms. In ‘Another Way’, her poetic response to the Gujarat riots of 2002, she advocates an artistic stance which seeks to “leave no footprints/ in the warm alluvium,/ no Dolby echoes,” and which, by its sheer openness to possibility in the matter of its own making, offers up a paradigm of good politics (as Derek Mahon said good poetry should), and of open-minded, liberated living. “To swing yourself/ from moment to moment,// never racing to the full-stop,/ content sometimes/ with the question mark” is, the poem suggests, as valuable a way of “keeping the faith” as to thrust oneself militantly into the front line waving “saffron flags”, and her work is notable for its refusal to sacrifice poetry to propaganda.

Light-footed and lyrically musical, sensuous and spare at the same time, although entwined with contemporary culture and events and, most predominantly, with the city of Mumbai, the poems engage with their external subject-matter from intelligent and unusual angles, frequently using an examination of their own procedures as a metaphorical bridge into something else, and vice-versa. In ‘Return’, for example, an old lover’s re-entry into the speaker’s home becomes conflated with the return of inspiration, “this dreaming playhouse of possibilities/ choreographed by another accent”.

The poem develops into a meditation on the essential ‘two-ness’ of the artist – on the gap between empirical self and poetic voice, entities which come together unexpectedly and unpredictably in the “startled collision” of writing, where “the arm reaches out/ and finds/ with some primal riverine instinct/ a familiar lost tributary of self.” As the distantiation of self from body in the final image suggests, however (“the arm”, not “my arm”), this is not merely a self-fulfilling strategy, designed to do nothing more than document the means by which Subramaniam’s poems come into being. ‘Return’ elevates poetry and its way of ‘happening’ into a doctrine for a way of life, one whose emphasis on plurality, and the necessity of seeing things anew – of giving things the “space to test” themselves out – speaks volumes in a world of increasing polarisation, where identities are all too easily and rigidly formed.

Yet if some of the poems try to influence, and suggest better ways in which to shape the world beyond the written page, that world, in the form of the city of Mumbai, has invaded and conditioned their shapes at almost every turn, insinuating into the “dreaming playhouse of possibilities” its “insurgent cardiogram” of “flesh and mortar”, a “rabid wilderness/ of matter” which “refuses to yield/ to coercion or command”.

Whilst poems like ‘Living Alone’ may advocate, and indeed celebrate the successful making of space, “long afternoons/ gliding through rooms/ and rooms/ of vacant mind/ recovered after years of subletting”, their battle, like that of the art-form itself, is hard won in the context of, and always threatened and enhanced by, the ever-pulsing presence of the “garrulous” city into which they have been born, and of which they are confirmed inhabitants. Even if not overtly present in the frameworks of such poems, the city is always leaning up against their bounds, breathing into them and colouring their awareness of the temporary privilege of escape – even working its way, sometimes, into the domain of language itself, which becomes a kind of symbiotic partner, an inseparable element of the great, heaving organism of the whole: “a sentence heaves into view/ deflected by leaden vapours”.

As is perhaps inevitable in a boundlessly over-populated and commercially cluttered city like Mumbai, writing can by no means find immunity or synthetic ‘solutions’ easily, and the poems are both frustrated in their efforts to convey or delineate such multiplicity, and continually invaded by its bits and pieces, “an obstinate conspiracy/ between self-perpetuating/ coffee cups and the frantic/ bushfire of books laundry Chinese restaurants”.

Subramaniam’s Mumbai is a city bursting at both the material and the human seams, a site of endless paradox, of holiness intermingled with abject horror, and one in which the individual subject, like the poem, is both totally and terrifyingly anonymous, and, at the same time, involved in everything:

City where you can drop off
a swollen local
and never be noticed.
City where you’re a part
of every imli-soaked bhelpuri.

Accordingly, her attitude towards its “hope and bulimia” is two-fold: whilst the poems often display delight at the sheer variety and character on offer in a city “uncontained by epigram” – what MacNeice called the “incorrigibly plural” world – they also recognise, like MacNeice, the “spite” inherent in that world, and, whilst they don’t tend to indulge in the perhaps too easy practice of overt, hectoring social commentary, stray lines and images do indicate a disapproval of, as she puts it, the “status quo”, and a celebration of naturally engendered variegation (“Give thanks/ for the strumpet apparel/ of the rhododendron,/ the rococo benediction/ of fern”) goes hand in hand with a concerned awareness of both the monetary disproportion endemic to the city, and the commercial bulge afflicting its havoc-ridden skyline.

Against the similarly marginalised populations of nature and the cripplingly poor, who, “perpetuating that third world profusion/ of outstretched hand”, have been forced to adopt “a certain cussedness” in order to survive, to create “ways of being ancillary…/ without resenting it”, she sets the ever-growing consumerist trend of “the great Indian middle class/ bloating steadily/ on duty-free”, filling up the remaining cracks and crevices with their insatiable demand for “things”. In such an atmosphere, the poems’ plea for “unransacked” space is profoundly and obviously, if quietly, political – an asserted need for the re-division, or re-apportioning of space, and for the recognition that all “things” do not have an equal claim on the space (or lack of it) “between tenancies”, that “foam and rubber” should perhaps give up ground to flesh and blood.

The heroes and heroines of Subramaniam’s poetry are things of stoical proportion, which are willing to commit to “asking the question/ that has been asked before”, to the continuation of “dated” and difficult rituals, or even just to “confirming yet again/ that it’s not about justice,/ just weather,/ just waiting”. These are all suggestive parallels for the act of writing itself, and particularly in the contexts she describes in her prose comments on the cultural establishment. Yet this should not suggest a laissez-faire aesthetic, or the idea that poetry trundles on endlessly, by and for itself, without much hope of, or interest in, the chance of making anything happen.

Poetry is a vital force for Subramaniam – in both senses of the word – and, if its balance is precarious in a world which simultaneously hurts and ignores it, then it nonetheless remains, emphatically, an integral part of that world, and one capable of tipping it, every now and then, in the right direction. Days, like poems and, indeed, status quos, rest “on slabs/ angled precariously - / a fragile architecture of meaning” into which the tiniest thing can insert itself, given the space, and alter or bring down the whole. “Which is why”, amongst many other reasons, “this” – the individual poem and the act of writing poetry – most definitely “matters”.

(By) Miriam Gamble

Some of her poems

5.46, Andheri Local

In the women’s compartment
of a Bombay local
we search
for no personal epiphanies.
Like metal licked by relentless acetylene
we are welded –
dreams, disasters,
germs, destinies,
flesh and organza,
odours and ovaries.
A thousand-limbed
million-tongued, multi-spoused
Kali on wheels.

When I descend
I could choose
to dice carrots
or dice a lover.

I postpone the latter.

Demand

And on days like this
nothing else will do.

Nothing but that whisper
of breath against the ear.

Breath that’s warm
like the sigh of palmyra trees
in Tirunelveli plantations.

Breath
that’s crisp
like linen, rice-starched,
dhoop-soaked,
in a family cupboard.

Breath
to be trusted,

with a thread maybe
of something
your foremothers never knew,
or pretended not to –
the spice-mist
of hookah on winter nights
in Isfahan, or raw splatter
of Himalayan rain, or wine
baroque with the sun
of al-Andalus.

Breath
of outsider,
ancestor,
friend,

who leaves nothing more than this
signature of air
against skin,
reminding you
that there’s nothing respectable
about family linen
when cupboard doors close,

reminding you
that this
this uncensored wilderness
of greed
is simply –
or not so simply –

body.

Home

Give me a home
that isn’t mine,
where I can slip in and out of rooms
without a trace,
never worrying
about the plumbing,
the colour of the curtains,
the cacophony of books by the bedside.

A home that I can wear lightly,
where the rooms aren’t clogged
with yesterday’s conversations,
where the self doesn’t bloat
to fill in the crevices.

A home, like this body,
so alien when I try to belong,
so hospitable
when I decide I’m just visiting.

Madras

I was neither born nor bred here.


But I know this city


of casuarina and tart mango slices,
gritty with salt and chilli
and the truant sands of the Marina,


the powdered grey jowls of film heroes,


my mother’s sari, hectic with moonlight,
still crackling with the voltage
of an MD Ramanathan concert,


the flickering spice route of tamarind and onion
from Mylapore homes on summer evenings,


the vast opera of the Bay of Bengal,
flambéed with sun,


and a language as intimate as the taste
of sarsaparilla pickle, the recipe lost,
the sour cadences as comforting
as home.


It’s no use.
Cities ratify
their connections with you
when you’re looking the other way,


annexing you
through summer holidays,
through osmotic memories
of your father’s glib
lie to a kindergarten teacher
(‘My mother is the fair one’),


and the taste of coffee one day in Lucca
suddenly awakening an old prescription –
Peabury, Plantation A
and fifty grams of chicory
from the fragrant shop near the Kapaleeshwara temple.


City that creeps up on me
just when I’m about to affirm
world citizenship.

Rutting

There was nothing simple about it
even then –

an eleven-year-old’s hunger
for the wet perfection

of the Alhambra, the musky torsos
of football stars, ancient Egypt and Jacques Cousteau’s

lurching empires of the sea, bazaars
in Mughal India, the sacred plunge

into a Cadbury’s Five Star bar, Kanchenjanga, kisses bluer
than the Adriatic, honeystain of sunlight

on temple wall, a moon-lathered Parthenon, draught
of northern air in Scottish castles. The child god craving

to pop a universe
into one’s mouth.

It’s back again,
the lust
that is the deepest
I have known,

celebrated by paperback romances
in station bookstalls, by poets in the dungeons
of Toledo, by bards crooning foreverness
and gut-thump on FM radio
in Bombay traffic jams –

an undoing,
an unmaking,
raw
raw –

a monsoonal ferocity
of need.

Sister

Supple as wisteria
her plait of hair across our beds –
my talisman at the age of five
against torch-eyed gods and ancestors
who leaked nocturnally
out of cupboards, keyholes,
the crevices of festering karmas.

Later
we drank deep draughts
of monsoon wind together,
locked eyes in mistrust,
littered our bedroom with books, fuzzy battle-lines,
quivering dominions of love and malice,
even as we ruptured time,
scooping world upon world
out of cavernous weekend afternoons
through the alchemy of mutual dream –
turquoise summers over ruined Mycenae,
the moon-watered stone of Egyptian temples,
and those times we set the zephyr whispering
under the black skies of Khorasan.

Clothes were never shared,
diaries zealously guarded,
but in the hour before the mind
carves out its own fiefdoms of memory
we dipped into the same dark estuaries
of lust, grief and silted longing.

Now in rooms
deodorised into neutrality,
we sniff covertly
for new secrets, new battles, new men,
always careful to evade
the sharp salinity of recollection,
anything that could plunge us back
to the roiling green swamp of our beginnings.

But tonight if I stood at my window
it would take very little, or so it would seem,
to swing myself across
to that blazing pageant of peonies
that is your Brooklyn back-garden,
careening across continents
on that long-vanished plait of hair,
sleek with moonshine,
fragrant with Atlantic breezes.

The Same Questions

Again and again the same questions, my love,
those that confront us
and vex nations,
or so they claim –

how to disarm
when we still hear
the rattle of sabre,
the hiss of tyre
from the time I rode my red cycle
all those summers ago
in my grandmother’s back-garden
over darting currents of millipede,
watching them,
juicy, bulging, with purpose,
flatten in moments
into a few hectic streaks of slime,

how to disarm,
how to choose
mothwing over metal,
underbelly over claw,
how to reveal raw white nerve fibre
even while the drowsing mind still clutches
at carapace and fang,

how to believe
this gift of inner wrist
is going to make it just a little easier
for a whale to sing again in a distant ocean
or a grasshopper to dream
in some sunwarmed lull of savannah.

Where I Live

(for Anders who wants to know)

I live on a wedge of land
reclaimed from a tired ocean
somewhere at the edge of the universe.

Greetings from this city
of L’Oreal sunsets
and diesel afternoons,
deciduous with concrete,
botoxed with vanity.

City of septic magenta hair-clips,
of garrulous sewers and tight-lipped taps,
of ’80s film tunes buzzing near the left temple,
of ranting TV soaps and monsoon melodramas.

City wracked by hope and bulimia.
City uncontained
by movie screen and epigram.
City condemned to unspool
in an eternal hysteria
of lurid nylon dream.

City where you can drop off
a swollen local
and never be noticed.
City where you’re a part
of every imli-soaked bhelpuri.

City of the Mahalaxmi beggar
peering up through
a gorse-bush of splayed limbs.

City of dark alleys,
city of mistrust,
city of forsaken tube-lit rooms.

City that coats the lungs
stiffens the spine
chills the gut
with memory

City suspended between
flesh
and mortar
and foam leather
and delirium

where it is perfectly historical
to be looking out
on a sooty handkerchief of ocean,
searching for God.

[All poems are under copyright. Copying from any form is forbidden .Contact the author]

Architecting irony in poetry

Adil Jussawalla

Adil Jussawalla was born in Mumbai, and spent most of the years between 1957 and 1970 in England where he studied to be an architect, wrote plays, read English at Oxford and taught English at a language school. Returning to Mumbai, he taught English at St Xavier’s College between 1972 and 1975. An Honorary Fellow at the International Writing Program in Iowa in 1977, Jussawalla has participated in several international conferences and festivals.

Jussawalla’s highly acclaimed first book, Land’s End, written almost entirely in England and Europe, was published when he was twenty-two. It was hailed by a critic as a book that captured “the artificiality and vulgarity of this age, the paradoxical nature of our emotions and desires, the unbridgeable gulf between ‘you’ and ‘I’, between dream and reality and the beauty and ugliness of love.”

In the poetry of Jussawalla, we no longer find the Janus-faced postcolonial impulse of looking to the past to reaffirm the present. The poetry is born instead of a decision to look the present unflinchingly in the face, in all its disfigured and fractured reality. There is no attempt to escape “the various ways of dying that are home”, no resort to a visionary romanticism nor a nostalgic recreation of a more innocent history.

The irony grows darker and is accompanied by a discernible political consciousness (Marxist-Fanonite in inspiration) in the second book, Missing Person, written after his return to India. While a morally compromised, hollow and absurd world is acknowledged, the self is also implicated in the failed quest for meaning. “If one tried literally to represent the different elements of world culture of which one’s mind is made, one would write a language no one would understand. I have tried to suggest this chaos in Missing Person,” says Jussawalla.

But also implicit in this evocation of chaos is a trenchant critique of the underlying market-driven ethic of the bourgeoisie – a class that “can only torment itself with its own contradictions or turn on itself in a fury of self-destruction”.

As critic Sudesh Mishra puts it: “For Jussawalla, the ironic emphasis on the marginal and the ‘non-human’ is perhaps a way of saying that the processes involved in the dehumanisation of art may well, in the future, contribute to the rehumanisation of man.”

Jussawalla’s is not an immediately accessible poetry, nor does it aspire to be. When asked in an interview by Peter Nazareth in 1978 about the peril of being incomprehensible, Jussawalla responded, “Well, I think the situation of the poet in India is such that being misunderstood is part of his function.”

In the same interview, Jussawalla was asked about the responsibility of the writer in times of crisis. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I think each writer will deal with the crisis in his own way . . . Maybe I see writing as an activity, at least for me personally, as linked up with a whole life, a whole sense of time. Indian writers do have a different sense of time in relation to their own work than the writers in the States, in England and in France, which means that we are bound to have a different attitude even to crisis . . . Am I being fatalistic if I say that for Indians, the crisis is perpetual?”

(By)Arundhathi Subramaniam

Some of his poems

[All under copyright. No reproduction by any source without the permission of the Author}

Sea Breeze, Bombay

Partition's people stitched

Shrouds from a flag, gentlemen scissored Sind.

An opened people, fraying across the cut

country reknotted themselves on this island.

Surrogate city of banks,

Brokering and bays, refugees' harbour and port,

Gatherer of ends whose brick beginnings work

Loose like a skin, spotting the coast,

Restore us to fire. New refugees,

Wearing blood-red wool in the worst heat,

come from Tibet, scanning the sea from the north,

Dazed, holes in their cracked feet.

Restore us to fire. Still,

Communities tear and re-form; and still, a breeze,

Cooling our garrulous evenings, investigates nothing,

Ruffles no tempers, uncovers no root,

And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories.

Approaching Santa Cruz Airport, Bombay

Loud benedictions of the silver popes,
A cross to themselves, above
A union of homes as live as a disease.
Still, though the earth be stunk and populous,
We’re told it’s not: our Papa’ll put his nose
Down on cleaner ground. Soon to receive
Its due, the circling heart, encircled, sees
The various ways of dying that are home.
‘Dying is all the country’s living for,’
A doctor says. ‘We’ve lost all hope, all pride.’
I peer below. The poor, invisible,
Show me my place; that, in the air,
With the scavenger birds, I ride.

Economists enclosed in History’s
Chinese boxes, citing Chairman Mao,
Know how a people nourished on decay
Disintegrate or crash in civil war.
Contrarily, the Indian diplomat,
Flying with me, is confident the poor
Will stay just as they are.
Birth
Pyramids the future with more birth.
Our only desert, space; to leave the green
Burgeoning to black, the human pall.
The free
Couples in their chains around the earth.

I take a second look. We turn,
Grazing the hills and catch a glimpse of sea.
We are now approaching Santa Cruz: all
Arguments are endless now and I
Feel the guts tighten and all my senses shake.
The heart, stirring to trouble in its clenched
Claw, shrivelled inside the casing of a cage
Forever steel and foreign, swoops to take
Freedom for what it is. The slums sweep
Up to our wheels and wings and nothing’s free
But singing while the benedictions pour
Out of a closing sky. And this is home,
Watched by a boy as still as a shut door,
Holding a mass of breadcrumbs like a stone.

Colour Problems in the Family

Mother forgot her features when the rest,
Pinker with Persia, found her future black.

So father turned up, obligingly darker,
His iron skin scorched in its shirt of rust.

Yellow frogs, grandmother called us,
Sallow herself, brass with a touch of ash.

Then you, rose, haven for browns and blacks,
Said that colours that ran in my family
Had no place in your sun.

True.
They were colours I shed on your shoulder,
Bled on your shirt as you spoke.
They were true, and continue to run.

Geneva

Let me put out my welcome like a flag
Of olive leaves to wrap you in my truce:
Geneva: metropolis: one of the neutral cities
Here to relax you. I do not rot, or run
With sores like children; fertile, eastern suns
Breed maggots like brats; but spotless, sunburnt backs
Is all my shining citizens may (publicly) show.
The rest you may read in my eyes, my glazed shop-windows.
What do you see there?
A stuffed eagle and a clapping-clockwork bear.

Let me console you. I wasn’t made between
A sundown and sunrise in labour, by hands in bitterness,
Or hands weeping over rubble; not one
Built in a brickless desert of brick, nor stone
From the sacked quarries of Greece; but a white palace
Sits on my green acres: from shattered lands
Troubled statesmen wear away its steps
For you; I’ll bring you peace: I understand,
Keep, as a souvenir,
A stuffed eagle and a clapping-clockwork bear.

Smile, love, mix in my cafés, think of
Jerusalem; bless, in St Peter’s, my vigil and valour.
My fountain leaps a sixth of a mile in hope,
And Peace a turbine humming in the deep.
My museums –

The voice cracks, the streets darken,
The sword falls dripping through the yellowing air.
There are no clouds, but over the dwarfed city,
Dwarfing the toy Alps, fight

A stuffed eagle and a clawing, clockwork bear.

The Waiters

Blacker than wine from the loaded grapes of France,
Blacker than mud their Tamil minds recall,
Dark skins serving dishes to the sallow
Sweat more night than grapesblood has. All
The long summers they abjured, for chance
Of better prospects, change, a sun of contrast,
Stick in a language their clients won’t allow.
Must button up their manners with the past.
Grow expert on the epicure’s stuffed heart,
Polite of speech, punctilious, guarded, kind.
As guardians of good taste, these waiters know
The soiled and cluttered kitchens of the mind,
The rancid oils where sweeter dishes start,
Cooked, like a pick-up’s words, the soot-black roof
Behind our pasted smiles: their darkness grew
To insight in their day; they stand aloof.
But slacken in their service after eleven.
Guarding the day’s unending appetites,
Grow shifty-eyed, avoid our munching faces,
The spit and polish of our eating rites.
Then closing time: they dream of a foodless heaven,
Shrug off their coats like priestly cloaks of pity,
Day’s ministry complete. Slip to their sleeping places
In the throat of the feasted, pink-faced city.

© Adil Jussawalla

NINE POEMS ON ARRIVAL

Spiders infest the sky.
They are palms, you say,
hung in a web of light.

Gingerly, thinking of concealed
springs and traps, I step off the plane,
expect take-off on landing.

Garlands beheading the body
and everyone dressed in white.
Who are we ghosts of?

You. You. You.
Shaking hands. And you.

Cold hands. Cold feet. I thought
the sun would be lower here
to wash my neck in.

Contact. We talk a language of beads
along well-established wires.
The beads slide, they open, they
devour each other.

Some were important.
Is that one,
as deep and dead as the horizon?

Upset like water
I dive for my favourite tree
which is no longer there
though they've let its roots remain.

Dry clods of earth
tighten their tiny faces
in an effort to cry. Back
where I was born,
I may yet observe my own birth.

EVENING ON A MOUNTAIN

The valley sunned itself all day, its span
Curving up two foothills; then the shadows
Crossed like wings across its back; further,

Ferries embroidered a slim lake, stitching
Silk into its cotton, prows snipping...
How still it was then! the sky thin and hollow,

Deflecting the words stoned across the valley,
The ears straining at each rebound; for off,
A cloud, launched from a rock, streaked

North like a startled bird.

Halt X

I
I do not know what station this is, or why
We broke our journey; checked, here in Derbyshire,
One senses danger, disquietude only.

Pieces of smoke litter the huddled town-
Card collage on felt; no pattering movement
On roads of sliding newspaper, sidling dog.
No alighting or descending the steps of its drizzling doors.

II
Rain fell like a drizzle of fine slag
On an anonymous town in smudged Derbyshire.
I counted sixty chimneys in a quarter
The size of a burgher's courtyard, wondered at smoke
Sliding edgeways through the dawn's widening slats.

A flock of pigeons dissolved in the viscid air
Like a piece of mud in a current; 5 o'clock.
A streetlamp craned its neck for the spreading frogs.