150

CHAPTER 5

MODERN INDIAN ENGLISH WOMEN’S POETRY: THEMES, STYLES,

PERSPECTIVES AND AFFILIATIONS.

In his introduction to the anthology One Hundred Indian Poets: Signatures, (2001) K.

Sachidanandan observes that,

The polyphonic and often polyglot plurality of the modernist Indian text reflects the poets‘ attempt to express the new cultural ferment that far exceeded the formal resources of the prevailing modes. (xxxii) Also that,

Another alternative nationhood being forged today is that of the women poets who consciously or unconsciously strive to subvert our phallocentric social order: revisionary myth-making, naked confession, the forging of counter- metaphors, the establishment of an alternate semiotics of the body, uninhibited forays into the feminine psyche – all these seem to be on their national agenda. (xxxviii)

Indian women writing poetry in English have been increasing in number since the

1970s. They write from diverse cultural, linguistic and geographical spaces. They also write in the midst of many pressures and expectations. Nissim Ezekiel‘s view of the poet‘s struggle ____

One good thing about your life is that in this struggle to keep up with your writing you‘ll find that you will never have the problem of a writer writing in an ivory tower because you are so firmly earthbound, you are so firmly linked with life, think of all these many demands holding you down … ‗Perhaps that is the best kind of solution to the problems a woman writer faces, an attitude like that ___ is cited by Gita Hariharan who adds, ‗Perhaps this is the best kind of solution to the problems a woman writer faces, an attitude like that‘. (Kuortti 106)

Arlene Zide writes that her anthology, In Their Own Voice, aims to focus ‗on seeing through women‘s eyes, a different women‘s-eyed view of the world in poetry‘. Zide 151 quotes Eunice de Souza‘s observation that, ‗The battle is to validate the material to begin with ___ the stuff of women‘s lives, women‘s experience, not to ‗transcend‘ being a woman.‘ (xix Zide)

Although Deshpande does not figure in Eunice de Souza‘s Nine Indian

Women Poets of 1997 which begins with Kamala Das, ushering in the new age of women‘s poetry, she was writing English poetry in the 1960s when Das came on the scene. In a selection of three poets for the journal Quest, (No. 74) for its 1972 issue on

‗Contemporary Indian Poetry In English: An Assessment And Selection‘ guest edited by Saleem Peeradina, Eunice de Souza chose a selection of poems by Mamta Kalia,

Kamala Das, and Gauri Deshpande. De Souza notes that ‗these three women poets have one quality in common: in relation to the conventional idea of Indian women, they express themselves very freely‘. (Peeradina, 84) Having said that, de Souza flays

Deshpande‘s poetry, saying that only a few of her poems are good. Deshpande had at this time, published two of her three anthologies __ Between Births, 1968 and Lost

Love, 1970, both from P Lal‘s ‗Writers Workshop‘ in Kolkata. In a review article titled ‗Two Anthologies‘ in the same issue of Quest ‟74, the reviewer Eunice de

Souza is scathing about both anthologies __ Modem Indian Poetry in English: An

Anthology and a Credo, edited and published by P. Lal of ·writers Workshop,

Calcutta, in 1969, and V. K. Gokak's The Golden Treasury of lndo-Anglian Poetry

1828-1965 published in 1970. Both were ‗reckless‘ according to de Souza in their indiscriminate and wide selection of poets and scribblers. Eunice de Souza‘s observations regarding the anthologies, lay down the new and ultimately prevailing critical assessment of modern Indian English Poetry. Deshpande was anthologized in collections edited by Peeradina, Pritish Nandy and Keki Daruwala in the 1970s. Her last book of poems in English appeared in 1970, although she published a collection 152 of short stories in English titled The Lackadaisical Sweeper in 1997. Deshpande‘s work has been described ‗as strongly feminist, wryly humorous—usually at her own expense, confident yet self-critical, irreverent yet steeped in tradition, cosmopolitan yet grounded in her love for language and place. No matter who or where her audience is, she is bound to challenge their assumptions, producing both discomfort and delight‘, by Jyotsna Rege in ‗Gauri Deshpande: A Distinctive Voice‘. ( Rege 3)

The article is about Deshpande‘s English short story collection and not her poetry.

Deshpande worked for the Illustrated Weekly of India in the 1960s, a time when there was a lot of English poetry, good and bad, in circulation. After her three volumes of

English poems, Deshpande moved on to writing in her native language, Marathi, as stated by Josna Rege in Sparrow Newsletter. SNL Number 14, August 2008:

While Gauri Deshpande was unquestionably one of the most important and innovative writers in contemporary Marathi literature, and was well-known and respected throughout India and among scholars of Maharashtra, she began her career writing well-received poetry in English. She published three collections with the Calcutta Writers Workshop and edited a collection of Indian poetry in English in the late sixties and early seventies, but then switched over to writing fiction in Marathi and made her name with her novellas and her translations. At the time of her death in 2003 she was relatively unknown beyond India; however, that was changing, since her work in English had been gaining greater exposure throughout the 1990s. One of her Marathi stories was translated into English and anthologized in the important two-volume Women Writing in India published in 1993, and her first collection of short stories in English, The Lackadaisical Sweeper, was published in 1997. Several of her important Marathi-English translations were also published or re-issued in the late 1980s and 1990s, including Sumitra Bhave‘s Pan on Fire: Eight Dalit Women Tell their Story (1988), Jayawant Dalvi‘s searing social critique, Chakra: a novel (1974, 1993), and Sunita Deshpande‘s …and Pine for What is Not (1995), a controversial memoir by the wife and secretary of the popular Marathi playwright P.L. Deshpande. (Rege 3)

Reshu Gupta observes in ‗Gauri Deshpande‘s Poetry‘ in ‗Images of Women in Gauri

Deshpande's Poetry‘ in Muse India. Issue 52: Nov-Dec2013, that,

Deshpande's poetry differs from other poets in terms of conventions, experimentation, spirit, values and sensibility. Her major concerns in poetry 153

can be divided into different categories like of man-women portrayals in terms of their marital and sexual relationships, concept of death, sense of alienation and frustration, identity crisis, recognition, and urge for feminine sensibilities. (Gupta Web)

De Souza‘s critical comments on Deshpande in 1972 notwithstanding, in 1980 Keki

Daruwala published both Deshpande and De Souza‘s poems in his collection of eight poets Two Decades of Indian Poetry 1960-1980. That they are the only two women poets apart from Kamala Das in this volume that includes poets such as Nissim

Ezekiel and the poets from Parthasarthy‘s Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, makes this according to reviewer, Alamgir Hashmi ‗what to P. Lal would surely be __ a rigorous Darwinian selection‘. (Hashmi 219)

Deshpande‘s poetry in English does mark a place at the starting point of the modern trend in women‘s poetry in English. But her diction and tenor are not like

Kamala Das‘s. The colloquial tone of Das‘s poetry set a trend that is found in poets such as Mamta Kalia, Charmayne D‘ Souza, Melanie Silgardo and Smita Agarwal.

There is also the tone of rebellion and defiance. In Deshpande‘s poetry the defiance is not in the tone but in the acknowledgement that she and others like her compromised in personal life. She writes in the poem, ‗We Hadn‘t the Guts‘:

to cut and quit when the quitting was good. Now what floundering lives we lead have got left not love nor lust. (Between Births, 15)

Hers is a voice that expresses the tribulations of a woman‘s life in a different language, as she herself states in the much anthologized poem, ‗The Female of the

Species‘ in the same collection :

Sometimes you want to talk about love and despair and the ungratefulness of children. A man is of no use whatever then. You want then your mother or sister 154

or the girl with whom you went through school … You sit with them and talk. She sews and you sit and sip and speak of the rate of rice and the price of tea and the scarcity of cheese. You know both that you‘ve spoken of love and despair and ungrateful children. ( 12)

The tone of stoic acceptance in Deshpande‘s poems in this first volume Between

Births (1968) was bypassed by the younger generation of poets in favour of satiric wit or loud protest. Deshpande‘s poetry seemed spoken from a point beyond turbulence, as in ‗I wanted to weep‘,

…for you And me But I had already spent All tears in useless mournings. So now I watch arid eyed As my fingers open slowly And let you go. ( 20)

The poems on love, or rather lost love, convey despair and desperation as in the lines, in the four part poem sequence ‗Death‘ with which, very appropriately she opens the collection. For death is what lies between births. And becomes a sought for love whom she had left. She concludes the last poem in the sequence with these lines:

I return now… Return to beg for the sanctuary not of love, only of your arms. (3)

Death is unexpected, she had stated in the opening lines of the first poem in the sequence:

We live and meet with death Turning a street corner. But I want to see him coming … Await with him… …and walk the seven steps With him that‘ll make him 155

My ally. (1)

She conflates the idea of death and marriage in an understated way. Yet marriage is not demeaned in the process, it makes the man her ‗ally‘.

Among the poems on love, there is one that shows the acceptance of long- distance relationships ruptured by different time zones. This is the fifth poem in the sequence of short poems titled ‗(somewhat) Haiku‘ __

Oh so far; it‘s no use masking your absence. With us night‘s not simultaneous. (2)

Yet there are moments when the poet catches herself by surprise as in the poem ‗The Habit‘ where the speaker recalls how she was told she would ‗get used to it‘ when in childhood a puppy dog died. She gets used in later life to loss of,

an arm a friend, a child, a shade And … I got over it I got used to it All dying and my living. Now when I see him crossing a street to me, coming swiftly How am I going to get used to him. (18)

‗Habit‘ is a poem that finds resonance and reply, thirty four years later, in Smita

Agarwal‘s poem ‗At Forty‘ where Agarwal mentions the progressing litany of hurts:

‗At nine/ the passing away of a puppy‘, ‗at sixteen, heartbreak‘, ‗at twenty one‘ holding back distress, but with a different conclusion. By 2005, when Agarwal published her poetry there had come about a change in the way women now dealt with hurts. This new attitude is discussed across the poets that follow.

The poems by Deshpande discussed above, were published in the Writers

Workshop volume of 1968 Between Births. The title of the book indicates not only the periods in a woman‘s reproductive life, between birth-giving, but also the changing 156 avatars of a woman‘s lifetime of roles, the deaths and regenerations, the transformations that are part of a woman‘s life. Deshpande‘s poetry is often cerebral and more aligned to Ezekiel than Kamala Das‘s style. The things Gauri Deshpande writes about __ love, loss, children, nostalgia __ are what constitutes Das‘s poetry and much of women‘s poetry, but it is Deshpande‘s treatment that is different. There is a philosophical stance like Ezekiel, not the wit of D‘ Souza or Mamta Kalia, nor the urgency of Das. A poem such as ‗Theory of Materials‘ in her second collection Lost

Love (1970) ___

There is something inherently Attractive about fire __ Smell, shape, noise, heat, colour ___ That almost conquers fear and stretches my hand. Is the most elementary Desire To corrode to what we were __ Steel to rust and ore, Man to ash and fire? (33)

Kamala Das‘s poems on love show the speaker drawn to the world outside the lovers‘ cocoon, especially to images of suffering and deprivation, beggars, urchins, poor women. In Deshpande the world seems like a hindrance and distraction to the speaker.

The opening piece in Lost Love, titled ‗Poem‘, shows the speaker, ‗Buffeted by a continual contact/ with unimportant events‘ as she makes her way to her lover ‗across/

A thick stream of traffic‘. The things that block her path are not just,

large red buses, sleek new cars, thin people, small children, scooters, cycles, (1) but, ‗once in a way/ a friend; I have to stop and talk‘. She says how the man waiting for her at the other end sights her ‗glimpsingly‘ across the hurdles,

and won‘t wait too long, with a half-smile in your raised eyebrow will leave me between shores 157

and walk off . (1)

In contrast to Das, whose poems show the woman waiting in a state of abjection, or talk of leaving the ‗prison of your love‘, Deshpande subtly implies that the friend will be given time, while the lover is kept waiting. And though he walks off leaving her

‗between shores‘ it is clear she will not drown. In ‗Waiting‘ in the same collection, the lover comes to the waiting speaker, spends the night and leaves in the morning after a night spent talking. The last stanza underlines the speaker‘s preoccupation with the things besides love. After he leaves,

I had meant to wait for tears But a flight of red Dragonflies distracted me And kept from remembering The shape of your lips. (26)

This is the picture of a self-reliant confident woman, who loves, waits, enjoys her relationship, but has her world too. Deshpande‘s poetry does not show the woman suffering, or bitter. If there is a bitter note , it is not directed at a love relationship gone sour, but at larger social concerns, as in the poem ‗Portrait‘ in the same volume, where she describes a beggar woman in rags clutching at the red coin of small denomination given by someone by ‗shamefacedly‘ ‗rustling‘ fingers digs it out from the bigger currency in the purse. The poem‘s last line marks the moment as,

‗Christmas Day __ Mother and Child‘. (28)

But not all of Deshpande‘s poetry is philosophical. A poem such as

‗Integration‘ in Lost Love records the harsh condition of singleness __

If only I‘d die If only there were someone to fall in love with If only the day was all done with And the night... (14)

158

Yet it is the title of the poem, ‗Integration‘ that suggests that the notion of singleness is also perhaps socially constructed, ‗this gnawing unrest that was sent/ From far away mysteriously‘, and designed to break the individual‘s sense of self, ‗Destroying to elemental everything / All that I call me‘. ( 14)

Even in the eventuality of a lover departing, leaving her pregnant, the woman speaker returns to the world of

all that is familiar: book, faces, chattering voices, bells, criticisms… I find my larder empty of memories we had cleverly not made, and concludes, ‗the time is near, then to return / to loves other than the first‘. (16) The use of the word larder instead of heart and mind, underscores the relegation of the relationship to the mundane.

In the poem ‗Eclipse‘, also in Lost Love, when the lovers are in a darkness of

‗sorrow, delay, departure, suspicion‘, the speaker notices ‗a drongo‘,

in its poised, black, fork-tailed flight … alight for one bright breathless instant between our unseeing eye and lack of sunshine. ( 19) once again indicating the outside world that will eclipse even this moment of pain.

This is an acknowledgement of the wider world in which the self is located. There is in Deshpande‘s poems in this volume, a consistent employment of the world as antidote to love‘s disasters. This is feministic, as much as the anguished cry for lost love in Kamala Das, or the acerbic wit towards departing loves in Charmayne

D‘Souza is feministic. The sense of acceptance of the condition of being single in many of the modern women poets may be traced to the sense of balance, even after a lover leaves, found in poem after poem by Deshpande. In his Introduction to the issue 159 on ‗Contemporary Indian Poetry In English: An Assessment and Selection‘, in Quest

(No. 74), Peeradina writes, ‗The anthology does not 'represent' the individual poet's work, in the sense that it does not attempt to define or exhaust either the scope or the style of each poet. ·What it does intend is to bring together the worthwhile poets under one cover. (Peeradina xv) In this ‗anthology‘ collated by Peeradina, Gauri

Deshpande features not only as a poet, two of whose poems are selected by Eunice de

Douza for inclusion here, she also features as a selector herself, introducing poems by

R Parthasarathy. In her note on Parthasarathy, referring to his disillusion about the

English language, she writes, ‗There must be many poets of a younger age who have not cherished such illusions, to whom English is not the language of England only, but just one of the languages in which they happen to be proficient‘. (Peeradina 51)

Like Das, Deshpande finds the issue of English no longer relevant. In her poetry therefore there is not a single poem on the theme of language. Perhaps her practice as a bilingual writer helps her towards this ease about English in India. Coming back to her poems in that issue of Quest 74, the poems by Deshpande that Eunice de Souza selects are, ‗The Female of the Species‘ and ‗People Who Need People‘. This second poem is from Deshpande‘s third and last poetic collection, Beyond the Slaughterhouse

(1972).

The editorial in Quest (No. 74) by the Managing Editor, A B Shah is devoted to discussion of the way to sensitively help Bangladesh heal and rebuild after its bloody birth in 1971. He speaks of the global nexus of power and of third world nations, hunger and want. Looking back at this editorial published in 1972 helps understand why many of the poets of this period __ Kamala Das, Pritish Nandy, Gauri Deshpande, wrote about poverty and beggars. Even Ezekiel who is known as a cerebral poet confesses in the poem ‗In India‘, the predicament of his condition __ ‗I ride my 160 elephant of thought‘ in an India of beggars, pavement sleepers and hutment dwellers.

The editorial‘s discussion of the aftermath of the Bangladesh war of liberation, also explains the title of Deshpande‘s third volume, Beyond the Slaughterhouse. A poem sequence, ‗No One is Ugly Any More‘ has ten numbered poems with individual titles that can stand alone as complete poems. The second poem in this sequence, ‗By

Bread Alone‘, comments on the way one deals with beggar children.

I‘m painfully acclimatised to not flinching at beggar‘s touch; it‘s only a child that doesn‘t know it begs. Ashamed I put shrinking hand fisted upon its back and shake my head. It‘s only a child that knows refusal very well. (4)

The poem ‗Shoes‘, the third in the sequence, ‗No One is Ugly Any More‘, is a stark comment on a scene often found in Indian cities during the 1960s and 70s:

On pavements in suburbs, old men sell used shirts, parched pyjamas, shapeless jackets, and shoes. They can fit no human foot. Atrocious in their hardened age they are bought by affluent mendicants and tied to stumps of knees and palms of hands. (4)

If Kamala Das ushers in the ugly aspects __ rotting flesh, bodily odours, yellowed skin of the lovers‘ corporeal bodies __ subverting traditional images of the adored body,

Deshpande‘s poems such as these, usher into Indian English poetry, images of the ugly social fabric. Her images of the city as well as Kamala Das‘s images of the body may be traced back to T S Eliot‘s images of cities and bodies. But being women poets their poetic frame is kept rooted to the personal and to the local context and not distilled to a philosophical abstract plane. For instance the poem ‗Lord of the

Sorrows, Weekly‘, describes beggars collecting at different religious spots in the city 161 of Bombay (now Mumbai). Regardless of the religious denomination they move from place to place on days of alms and food distribution:

Wednesdays they collect at Mahim tuesdays and fridays, the devis claim them: Prabha, Mumbra, Mahalaxmi. Mondays, thursdays, Shiva and Datta. And saturdays, the Hanuman. The mosques are lit on fridays and while the rest rest on sundays some make weekly peace with god. (5)

The inconsistency of capital and small letters for the days of the week underline the irrelevance of such things to the beggars for whom the days of the week are known by prospects of food and alms. The fifth in this sequence is a poem on Bombay titled

‗This Fair Isle: A Report‘, alluding to its colonial history, that had attracted first the

Portuguese and later the British. The poem records the arrival of people not only from the across the seas but from far inland. Many of them find the gold leaf embossed pavements, fit ‗only to sleep on‘. The poem ends with the warning, ‗Do not bathe at sea; the effluence, unbelievable‘. (5) The poem uses the patriotic description of

Britain as ‗this fair isle‘ for Bombay, a British colonial acquisition. The subtitle of the poem, ‗A Report‘, further underlines the deadpan irony with which the poet clashes the dream of Bombay with the reality of Bombay. But it is a city that the poet finds herself in. In ‗My love is Like …‘, poem 7 in the sequence, the speaker describes the myriad crowds thronging the beach,

Families of people come out to walk holding children by the hand from cracks in walls, unanimous charge buy flowers, coconuts, balloons, bhel. We met them on the sand in the bus, along shops and stalls. In strange disguise of love. (6)

Later the speaker and her companion are startled to 162

see ourselves in along glass. It was only another pair, holding each other by the hand miming similar reflections of love. (6)

This poet is not Ezekiel who confessed to be on his ‗elephant of thought‘ far above those on the streets and pavements‘. This is a woman poet who finds herself among those she observes. But this location within the nameless throng is also a loss of personal identity. As women join the masses of working women there is no time to begin or sustain acquaintance. In poem 9, ‗Where do the Lonely People Live‘ of the sequence, ‗No One is Ugly Anymore‘, she suggests that in an earlier time a woman in the street, or park or train or bus, might have begun a conversation, ‗to ask my age, or children / at least the time‘. But now, ‗There is never any time‘. The speaker almost rues that as all women now look identical,

. . . And none of us bear any longer the usual marks, such as: mother, whore, matron, maid. (7)

The poem has been found to be ‗a reiteration of the loss even of gender roles within a changing society‘. (7)

Keki Daruwalla, Two Decades of Modern Poetry 1960-80 , that

Gauri Deshpande's poetry deals with the minutiae of everyday life, the coming of a lover, the death of a puppy dog, ingratitude of children. Everything is grist to her mill, from city with greasy caress and harsh endearments to a treescape, (44)

The strange solidarity forced by urban transport and employment pressures is expressed in the first poem of the sequence ‗Workaday Women‘ in Beyond the

Slaughterhouse,

In a city there are six long mondays when you spend your mornings jammed up against women sour smelling of sweat 163

perfume talcum soap each bracing to face the files machines pencils pupils people slights yells lunches delays. (16)

The vision becomes opaque as a rush of images assault it :

The skin will thicken toughen protect you from seeing the tailless cat, his forepaw torn the man with a gash from ear to ear sewn … and long ditches of water bordered by mounds of filth of course small children whose sight is agony. (16) The numbing, draining effect it has on one‘s emotional and conjugal life is expressed in the third segment:

And the too solid flesh will refuse when he demands that it melt at a saturday-touch. You have not been protected after all from women men children cats. (16)

Poems such as this pre-empt works such as Tara Patel‘s 1991 poem, ‗Single Woman‘.

But neither the city, nor lost love can keep down the poet‘s essential positivity. This appears with equal force in poems such as ‗Summer Sequence‘, another sequence of three poems around a theme. The last poem is a Keatsian burst of imagery, without the Keatsian angst, and celebrating the Indian scene:

This is a summer of flowers. They went berserk the blossoming trees: first it was silk cottons, straining with red bursts, sight; then mango, fragrant dripping honey on our sated lips and labarnum hanging in great globes of sun, (17) celebrating the ‗jacaranda‘s deep purple‘ the ‗cassia‘ and ‗gulmohur ___ flame fulfilment of passion‘, waiting for the paling of the ‗flamboyance of the relentless sun‘, for the rains to come to know ‗if jasmine can keep peace‘. (17) This awaiting of 164 another season after celebrating the present one underlines the poet‘s philosophy of serene acceptance of life‘s processes. This is in marked contrast to the anguish in

Kamala Das or the acerbic wit and irony of Tara Patel or Charmayne de Souza.

Deshpande writes in the first poem in the sequence ‗Poems in Winter‘, in her first volume Between Births, (1968).

In the autumn of my life (Is spring so far behind?) I can stand no more Anguish. The rusted heart no longer knows How to suffer. There is powerful imagery in lines such as, ‗…in her tiresome gyrations the earth has spun round many a summer And winter. They have sawed out little piles of Sawdust from my life Cutting away at the branch of memory. Now I can see only a face/ Perhaps a smile? That I feel I have met And again there‘s only that pungent smoke. Did I then love those? (23)

Deshpande was then twenty-six, not ‗in the autumn‘ of her life in a literal sense. Yet the poem suggests the expiration of a past sorrow. Autumn perhaps was the poet‘s state of mind. However, good poetry need not necessarily be autobiographical. The poem does convey in powerful terms the blurring of past sorrow. The previous poem in this collection is ‗A Change of Seasons‘. It describes a feeling of ‗foreboding‘ that is felt in the ‗breast tips‘ ‗as though a long weaned child/ thirsted again for milk‘. The poet/ speaker wonders if it is the onset of some infection,

Yet nothing happened And I dreamt in the night of long travels. When I woke up the sky was heavy And then it rained. (22)

Deshpande‘s poetry invokes nature in a way that is oppositional to the urban imagery of modernist poetry. In fact in the 1970s it was rare to find nature celebrated in most of the poets who have survived canonically into the present decade. 165

The later poetry of Eunice de Souza and Smita Agarwal published very recently does reflect on Nature. In Agarwal‘s poem as a sense of concern for the survival of the seasons.

Nature is invoked powerfully in the poetry of diaspora poet Meena

Alexander. Eunice de Souza‘s recent collection, Learn from the Almond Leaf (2016) takes a new direction from de Souza‘s earlier poetry, and echoes many of the images and language of Deshpande‘s poetry on nature. In fact the title poem ‗Learn from the

Almond Leaf‘ resonates with Deshpande‘s cadences:

Learn from the almond leaf which flames as it falls. The ground is burning. The earth is burning. Flamboyance is all. (1)

In ‗One Tree‘ in Learn from the Almond Leaf , Eunice de Souza writes,

One tree makes a garden. Two trees make a wood, Three trees make a forest. (19)

This counters Deshpande‘s grouse, ‗I must…call three trees a park‘ in Poem

1, ‗Removal to Metropolis‘ in the sequence ‗No One is Ugly Anymore‘ in the 1972 volume Beyond the Slaughterhouse. In the poem ‗Compound Life‘ in Learn from the

Almond Leaf, Eunice de Souza writes about her neighbours in an apartment house compound,

A compound full of silver cars.

The sky with not a single silver star, . . . What can trees do in such a place except light their own fires..‘ ( 7-8)

This is far from the anger and cynicism in her first volume Fix. 166

‗Catholic Mother‘, the first poem from her first collection Fix (1979) and included in her own epochal anthology Nine Indian Women Poets sets the tone:

Francis X D‘Souza father of the year. Here he is top left the one smiling. By the grace of God he says we‘ve had seven children (in seven years). We‘re One Big Happy Family God Always Provides India will Suffer for her Wicked Ways (these Hindu buggers got no ethics). Pillar of the Church says the parish priest Lovely Catholic Family says Mother Superior The pillar‘s wife says nothing‘. (39)

In 2009, Penguin, India brought out a compilation of four of her collections of poems along with excerpts from her novel Dangerlok under a new title A Necklace of Skulls.

The poem collections included in this volume are Fix (1979), Women in Dutch

Painting (1988), Ways of Belonging: Selected Poems (1990) and Selected and New

Poems (1994). The page numbers given below from these volumes, are from A

Necklace of Skulls. (2009)

‗Feeding the poor at Christmas‘ underlines the arrogant, miserly and grudging manner in which the poor are served old clothes and food. ‗Sweet Sixteen‘ in Fix describes the ridiculous prudery regarding sex that results in dangerous ignorance:

Well, you can‘t say they didn‘t try. Mamas never mentioned menses. A nun screamed: You vulgar girls don‘t say brassieres say bracelets … At sixteen, Phoebe asked me: 167

Can it happen when you‘re in a dance hall I mean, you know what, getting preggers and all that, when you‘re dancing? I, sixteen, assured her you could. (6)

Fix is largely about the closed community of Goan Catholics. The characters that people the poems are caricatures and stereotypes. De Souza‘s tone is mocking, and it is apparent that she is straining to break away from it. In fact there is an apology to the mother by the speaker in the poem, ‗Forgive Me, Mother‘:

that I left you a life-long widow old, alone.

But the tables have turned and now the speaker too is doomed to a life alone. She writes,

It was kill or die and you got me anyway. The blood congeals at lover‘s touch The guts dissolve in shit. I was never young Now I‘m old. In dreams I hack you. (24)

It is no wonder that de Souza found Deshpande‘s poetry unreal. Against such violent emotions Deshpande‘s controlled emotions, acceptance and even self -criticism appeared to de Souza to be not genuine. Eunice de Souza‘s early poetry took Kamala

Das‘s angst ridden confessions, combined them with the oppressive circle of her community and produced poetry that was razor sharp and scathing.

‗Autobiographical‘, the last but one poem in Fix recalls Plath in both theme and imagery:

Right, now here it comes. I killed my father when I was three. I have muddled through several affairs 168

and always come out badly. I‘ve learned almost nothing from experience. I head for the abyss with monotonous regularity.

A failed attempt to end her life is described with candour:

Yes, I‘ve tried suicide, I tidied my clothes but left no notes. I was surprised to wake up in the morning.

And the process of self-realization is a punishing one:

One day my soul stood outside me watching me twitch and grin and gibber the skin tight over my bones I thought the whole world was trying to rip me up cut me down go through me with a razor blade then I discovered a cliché: That‘s what I wanted to do to the world. (Necklace of Skulls 28-29)

Anjum Hassan observes of these lines in ‗The Sympathetic Ironist‘. Caravan 1 April

2010,

This is Sylvia Plath territory—―Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time…‖ and the famous ―Dying/ Is an art, like everything else‖ from the poem ‗Lady Lazarus.‘ And de Souza is not Plath, her statements about father and mother are explained in another poem as more sorrow for a father who died and left the mother poor and meek, than the rage that Plath expresses for a daddy. (Hassan Web) 22

The 1970s when Fix appeared was a time that had seen the battle of the poetry

‗schools‘ or as Bruce King says poetry nodes __ one comprising the Bombay poets,

Ezekiel, De Souza and others, the other comprising P Lal. In Calcutta. If de Souza had been critical of Gauri Deshpande‘s work (published by Lal from Calcutta) and P Lal‘s anthology, she too must have faced criticism for her own poetic style, the acerbic, ironical stance. Just as Kamala Das had written in ‗An Introduction‘, 169

…. Why not leave Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins, Every one of you? Why not let me speak in Any language I like? The language I speak, Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses All mine, mine alone,

Eunice de Souza writes in the last poem in Fix, ‗One Man‘s Poem‘ :

Irony as an attitude to life is passé, you said. So be it, friend. Let me be passé and survive. Leave me the cutting edge of words to clear a world for my ego. (de Souza, Necklace of Skulls 30)

Eunice de Souza‘s former students, Charmayne D‘ Souza and Melanie Silgardo not only come from the same Goan Catholic background followed by English Literature in College in Bombay, they subscribe in their poetry to a similar credo, of irony and self-reflexive satire. For Kamala Das the revolt and defiance was there but expressed as anguish and anger. Irony and satire enter Indian English poetry largely through

Eunice de Souza. The tendency to expose hypocrisies is of course reminiscent of

Kamala Das, who had upset middle class society by her scrutiny.

Don't sit/On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows‘ they had cried to her in ‗An Introduction‘. For de Souza it is the proverbial carpet instead of the ‗lace- draped windows‘ that becomes the grand cover-up of middle class hypocrisy.

In the poem ‗Landscape‘ from Selected and New Poems (1994) she says,

We push so much under the carpet — the carpet‘s now a landscape A worm embedded in each tuft There‘s a forest moving. (Necklace of Skulls 93)

In the article, ‗The Sympathetic Ironist‘ in Caravan magazine of 1 April 2010, Anjum

Hassan comments, 170

… de Souza‘s poetry has a great deal to do with this metaphorical, infested carpet. Saying the unsayable, bringing things out from under the carpet, is what gave her first collection — Fix (1979) — its potency. (Hassan Web)

The need to uncover hidden or covered up issues extends to the practice of poetry as well. At a time when the Indian English poets were expressing their sense of alienation or otherness in India as writers of English, and the poetic voice of Kamala

Das was expressing the otherness of women. Eunice de Souza‘s poem ‗Otherness /

Wise‘ subtly indicates a move beyond otherness:

I have spoken much of otherness and must now alas, practice what I teach. Your poems are no longer messages for me and mine have become an epitaph‘. (Necklace of Skulls 95)

The question of poetic location bothers the poet/critic/ English literature professor, suggesting a search for an understanding of the truth, like Nissim Ezekiel‘s search for

23 ‗an exact name‘.

In the poem ‗It‘s Time to Find a Place‘, in Selected New Poems (1994) echoing the title of Ezekiel‘s poem ‗A Time to Change‘. (Ezekiel 3-6) de Souza writes,

It‘s time to find a place to be silent with each other. I have prattled endlessly in staff-rooms, corridors, restaurants. When you‘re not around I carry on conversations in my head. Even this poem has forty-eight words too many. (Necklace of Skulls. 96)

The poem brings together the need for a place of one‘s own, not only in life, but in poetry too. The poem ‗forty-eight words too many‘ she feels, is like the endless prattle in public spaces, and now she seeks the inward calm of contemplation, a place where she can say just what she means, in the minimum number of words. But by now the 171 poet comes to a different sense of location. ‗Makeshift‘ appears in Muse India, Issue

68 (July –August 2016) and in the 2016 collection Learn from the Almond Leaf by De

Souza. Here the search for ‗a place‘ culminates in the realization that:

Makeshift homes for the living Makeshift the marriage tent Makeshift the bier for the final journey Makeshift the ground on which we stand. (Learn from the Almond Leaf, 12)

Again this is not just a realization of the makeshift texture of life, but also of one‘s location as a poet. At a remove of almost four decades now from her first volume Fix, and twenty two years after ‗It‘s Time to Find a Place‘, she writes ‗makeshift the ground /on which we stand‘. It‘s time now to learn from Nature. The title Learn from the Almond Leaf draws upon the reconciling aspect of nature.

The moon is feeling her age. All this waxing and waning. A long haul to no purpose. Even the dogs howl, (32) she writes in ‗The Moon is Feeling Her Age‘, published together with ‗Makeshift‘ in both Muse India and Learn from the Almond Leaf. This volume comes after many of her co-travellers in poetry __ Nissim Ezekiel, Gauri Deshpande, and Kamala Das are no more, as are no more her mother and aunt of whom she had written in her poems.

In the 2016 collection, she writes in a four line poem ‗Remains‘,

My mother‘s bones in a niche My aunt‘s ashes likewise. A lifetime. A lifetime. (30) A sense of the stark nullity left by death is stated in ‗Yet another Death

Poem‘,

I keep hearing sounds Of wind and water. 172

There is no wind. There is no water. There is no air. (24)

And in the next stanza,

I see the pallor on her face The hardening hand. I know There‘s no one there. (24)

The repetitive ‗no‘ is like a knell, sounding absence. The next poem in this collection,

Learn from the Almond Leaf is ‗Avocado Stone‘ that also deals with death, in this case the deaths of two friends, Alan and Ruth.

I have planted an avocado stone in my kitchen for Ruth and for Alan who died. Both friends, Ruth more so __ she of the voice of oatmeal and honey. I will replant the stone give it room to be a tree To last as long as grief lasts. (25)

Appearing in 2016, this poem harks back to the aunt in the famous 1988 poem

‗Women in Dutch Painting‘,

The afternoon sun is on their faces They are calm, not stupid, pregnant, not bovine. I know women like that and not just in paintings– an aunt who did not answer her husband back not because she was plain and Anna who writes poems and hopes her avocado stones will sprout in the kitchen. Her voice is oatmeal and honey. ( Eunice de Souza 2009: 47)

In the 1988 poem the oatmeal and honey voiced person, Anna, who ‗writes poems‘, is alive. In the 2016 poem the honey voiced person is Ruth, a friend. The poet suggests they are the same person by the line ‗she of the voice of oatmeal and honey‘. 173

Referring to a poem from twenty eight years earlier not only establishes the lasting influence of this person in the poet‘s life but also the fact that de Souza‘s poems are now being followed seriously by her readers and she can make the allusion to her earlier poem resonate with her readers. The poem underscores not only loss, but continuity through memory and continuity through nature __ the stone will sprout an avocado plant in her kitchen just as Anna had hoped to do with her avocado stones.

I have planted an avocado stone In my kitchen for Ruth and for Alan who died. Both friends, Ruth more so ____ She of the voice of oatmeal and honey. I will replant the stone give it room to be a tree To last as long as grief lasts. (25)

__ de Souza writes in the 2016 poem.

Her task as poet thus becomes one of nurturing memories and influences. The personal is still the basis of the poems now in 2016, but now it is strengthened and sustained by a sense of belonging with a larger natural and cosmic world. Learn from the Almond Leaf has many poems about the earth and the moon where the speaker compares herself to the moon, to the earth. These are not poems in a romantic mode but remoulding of the cosmic world in the light of the speaker‘s own situation. The title poem of the volume, ‗Learn from the Almond Tree‘, begins with a classic

Romantic proposition to learn from Nature, but the last line is tinged with the author‘s ironic existentialist observation:

Learn from the almond leaf which flames as it falls. The ground is burning. The earth is burning. Flamboyance 174

is all. (1)

Like the falling leaf, the poems in this collection are short, dry as falling leaf, pithy observations on life. ‗I Disentangled the Moon‘ shows how the view of the moon came at the cost of a tree. There is a self-critical note in the poem. It also harkens in the arid landscape that is the setting for the poems in this volume. There are shades of

Plath in the images of the natural world,

I disentangled the moon, from the branches. It‘s disappeared. I built a house. Sparrows no longer frolic in the mud. I chopped down the tree that obstructed my view. A lone raven breaks into song. (2)

There are three more moon poems towards the end of this slim volume. ‗The Moon is

Feeling her Age‘, is an evocation of aridity and bareness with only the moon and a dog‘s howl peopling the landscape,

The moon is feeling her age. All this waxing and waning. A long haul to no purpose. Even the dogs howl. (32)

The sense of futility after a lifetime is indicated in the poem. The next poem ‗Moon‘ continues the theme:

Pummelled out of shape, out of style, scarred, the moon hides her face behind The Towers. She‘s is in no hurry to emerge: She has a desert to cross, and a line of broken hills. (33)

‗Pummelled out of shape‘, ‗out of style, scarred‘ ‗hides her face‘, ‗The Towers‘ in capital letters, ‗a desert to cross‘ and ‗ a line of broken hills‘, evoke 9/11 images. 175

Seen in this light, the moon poems then rise above the personal and become a commentary on our times. The next poem ‗Moon and Star‘ picks out lines and phrases from the previous two moon poems ‗The Moon is Feeling her Age‘, and ‗Moon‘:

Moon and star survey the earth in tandem ___ Dogs, cats, sundry mammals. Moon picks out a poet staring at her. Not again, she thinks. ―The moon is feeling her age,‖ forsooth! (34)

The poet mocks her own stance in the previous poems __ the personifying attributions made to the moon in the previous poems __ and laughs at herself.

―Pummelled out of shape,‖ Indeed! Moon madness. (34)

So the moon is shown to express astonishment that the poet, after all just one among the ‗sundry mammals‘ on earth such as ‗dogs‘ and ‗cats‘, could write those previous poems about the moon. The moon now is shown to use an archaic ‗forsooth!‘ to mock the poet‘s archaism in writing about the moon. The moon says ‗Indeed!‖ at the poet‘s expression that she is ‗pummelled out of shape‘. And the last line has only two words to conclude the entire episode __ ‗Moon madness‘. Is the poet embarrassed about emotion, the last moon poem, ‗Moon and Star‘, begs the question. There is another cryptic reference to the moon in an earlier poem in this volume in the poem ‗Summer‘

__

Ash pits across the land In some the fires of Holi still smoulder. Even the moon has begun to take refuge from the sun. (4)

176

Is this just an innocuous poem about the raging heat of summer; are the smouldering ash pits merely literally the next day‘s scene after the festival of Holi, where all across northern India the fires are burnt to celebrate Holika. The legends of Holika have to do with the ire of gods and mortals. Is the poem an oblique reference to conflicts ‗all across the land‘; like the under-the-surface evocation of 9/11, this poem too suggests darker layers. ‗Kite Season‘ when colourful kites fly in the skies, also has a darker side __ the death of birds from the glass-powder coated, sharp kite string meant to cut off opponents‘ kites. Again the description is minimal, reinforcing the effect of the silent carnage:

The trees are festooned with kites of many colours. The trees are festooned with birds hanging by a wing an entangled leg glass-coated string. (3)

A motif of assault and violence continues even in poems about the seasons. Instead of one season giving way to a different one, bringing change and respite, in this volume the seasons too keep up the relentlessness, as in ‗Close on the Heels‘:

Close on the heels of a hot October comes a hot November a hot December. Somebody up there, down there, anywhere Have mercy. You are about to make cinders of us all. ( 5)

The ‗I‘ of the Fix poems now makes way often, for an ‗us all‘. Even when the ‗I‘ states something as personal as a request for last rites,

Fling my ashes in the Western Ghats They‘ve always seemed like home. may the leopards develop A taste for poetry The crows and kites learn 177

To modulate their voices. May there be mist and waterfalls Grass and flowers In the wrong season. (9)

This is a serene wish for last rites, the poet has made her peace with life, a far cry from the girl in Fix who had wanted to take her own life, and who, on failing that, wanted to hack at the world. Now instead she tries to save someone from such an end in ‗Mithi River‘, also in Lessons From the Almond Leaf:

Friend, come off that parapet. The Mithi River won‘t let you Sink or swim. It will carry you On a raft of garbage To a dying sea. Friend, come down Let be. (13)

The poet is now at one with life, with all life forms. A range of creatures people this

2016 collection published when the poet is seventy-six __ rats, crows, egrets, koel, a parrot, and a pet dog. These creatures are seen positively, affectionately and at times with mock exasperation, as the pet parrot that shreds her pack of cigarettes, in ‗Guide to a Well Behaved Parrot‘, the last poem in this book.

I shout at him. He shouts back. really I may as well have been married. (35)

In her early poems de Souza wrote about her community of Goan Catholics. Living in cosmopolitan Bombay, teaching college and writing poetry, there was a typecasting that she had to overcome as a Goan Catholic. The poem titled ‗My Students‘ in Fix

(1979) shows up the notion, prevalent among her students, of English poets and authors:

My students think it funny that Daruwallas and de Souza‘s 178

should write poetry. Poetry is faery lands forlorn. Women writers Miss Austen (17)

Her novel Dangerlok is a narrative delineating the life of a single woman Rina

Ferreira who lives with two parrots, smokes, teaches English literature, all the time negotiating the minor challenges posed by sundry persons and situations:

the autorickshow-wala who clog her lane with their double-parked vehicles; the neighbour who objects to the ‗kept‘ woman in the flat below hers; the lecturer who comes to the staff room, has a dosa and leaves without teaching a single class; students who wonder if she wears a nightie or has any friends; politicians who tear down mosques. With her cigarettes and mug of jungli tea, Rina observes them all, and dashes off letters brimming with the details of her life to David, an old flame now in America who calls up to talk about his girl friends when sober and to profess his love for her when half drunk. Funny, irreverent and sad, Dangerlok is the story of an urban life, with all its absurdities, loneliness and of course, danger.24

The poems after Fix gradually move towards an ironic acceptance of life‘s conditions. And there are later poems where irony is abandoned to express a raw cry from the heart. Aspects of Kamala Das‘s Annamalai poems of 1985, (reprinted in

Only the Soul Knows How to Sing ) resonate in three successive poems, by Eunice de

Souza ___ ‗Pilgrim‘, ‗Monsoon Journey‘ and ‗The Hills Heal‘ in the Women in Dutch

Painting volume of 1988. Both poets show tired beaten women seeking, in the mountains, solace for wounds and answers to questions. In ‗Pilgrim‘ Eunice de Souza asks of a hill shrine to which pilgrims throng,

God rock, I‘m a pilgrim. Tell me __ Where does the heart find rest? (de Souza 2009: 48)

In ‗Monsoon Journey‘, she begins with

This time the mountains were hidden by mist My lover is like smoke my dearest friend far away, and then mentions the lover‘s appreciation of her poetry 179

and of Simone Weil who says grace fills empty spaces where there is a void to receive it. (49)

Now, in the mountain mist, alone without lover and friend, the poet counters Weil‘s observation with,

It is grace itself which makes this void. We are on the brink. (49)

In the misty hillside, the poet finds grace in the void. This is like an epiphany and seems to redefine, revision Nissim Ezekiel‘s 1969 poem ‗Enterprise‘ where Ezekiel had concluded after years of seeking abroad that ‗Home is where we have to earn our grace‘. De Souza concludes her ‗Monsoon Journey‘ poem with ‗We are on the brink‘, suggesting the ambivalence of location __ that we are poised near the void which is grace, or that we are in the void that is grace but on the brink, and may fall out of grace. In the next poem ‗The Hills Heal‘ this is explained,

The hills heal as no hand does. …. Yet the world will maul again, I know, And I‘ll go gladly for the usual price. (de Souza 2009: 50)

A Necklace of Skulls came out in 2009 from Penguin India. One of the poems

‗Reluctant Spring‘ reappears in her 2016 volume Learn from the Almond Leaf. The

Women in Dutch Painting (1988) volume contains, apart from the three hill poems discussed above, recurrence of the images of desperation and violence that are found in her early poetry, in Fix. But there is a new twist this time. The poem titled ‗Eunice‘ shows the schoolgirl Eunice being reprimanded about her needlework by the

‗Embroidery Sister‘. As Eunice fumes angrily a sneaky classmate reports,

Eunice is writing bad words sister she‘s sewing up her head for the third time sister . . . 180

the limbs keep flopping the sawdust keeps popping out of the gaps sister‘. (53)

The poem effectively underscores the poet‘s habit of reconfiguring things so that the shams are exposed __ ‗The sawdust keeps popping‘. The snitch of a classmate is like the ‗categorisers‘ who had cried ‗Belong oh belong‘ in Kamala Das‘s ‗An

Introduction‘. And the girl Eunice is like Kamala Das, an odd one, who does not belong, but upsets the status quo.

Don‘t write of self? Self is a survivor- casualty moan-mongering tragi-comedy recalcitrant matter mixed metaphor struggling to breathe in an odour of sanctity. (65) she writes in the first poem in the poem sequence, ‗Songs of Survival‘. In the fourth poem in this sequence she writes, ‗Don‘t flail. / Don‘t let the hurt show‘. In

‗Transcend Self, You Say‘, she answers those who advise her to rise above the personal and write about myth and history,

Friend, the histories I know aren‘t fit to print. Remember Padma, widowed at seventeen, Forbidden to see the sun for a year, Allowed out to crap only at night When the pure were out of the way? (68)

In the next poem she suggests that the personal perhaps is the real, and that it is the spontaneous, angry utterance rather than polished verse that is validating. ‗Don‘t

Look for My Life in These Poems‘ shows her own rejection of impersonal poetry, as she writes, Poems can have order, sanity, / aesthetic distance from debris. (70)

Like the women in the poem ‗Women in Dutch Painting‘, who are ‗calm not stupid‘, de Souza‘s poems in this volume (Women in Dutch Painting) validate calmness of 181 being. ‗And She Lived Happily‘ describes the condition of acceptance that comes with time,

And she lived ever after Or perhaps reasonably happy for some of the time. Infancy and grand passions are exhausting modes of seeing. Now the grey sky is a sky not a pall the crocuses are allowed their hesitations friends and lovers their friends and sometimes even their lovers. As the days grow longer she sees students, friends, mother, aunts, not always there, but on call, often enough. (71)

Just as women in Dutch paintings remind the poet of women in India, an aunt, a friend, so too in the sequence titled ‗Five London Pieces‘, we get a glimpse into De

Souza‘s perceptions of life abroad. Addressed to a person she meets at a party (and implied to be a Londoner) the poem conveys de Souza‘s awareness of her English as her colonial history:

For a minute we stand blankly together. You wonder in what language to speak to me, … You are young and perhaps forgetful that the Empire lives only in the pure vowel sounds I offer you above the din. (75)

There is also the strange disillusion of meeting in the flesh English poets she had read in books back home in India, as the third poem, ‗Meeting Poets‘ in her 2016 collection.

Meeting poets I am disconcerted sometimes by the colour of their socks the suspicion of a wig the wasp in the voice 182

and an air, sometimes, of dankness. Best to meet in poems: cool speckled shells in which one hears a sad but distant sea. (76)

Here again, as in the poem ‗Don‘t Look for My Life in These Poems‘ cited above, there is the emphasis on the poem as a crafted product that does not really convey the poet‘s being. The last poem in this sequence, ‗A Good Day‘ is flippant about the task of poetry,

It‘s been a good day. My lover has been unusually witty. ….. My muse is tapping out a message on my Olivetti: at least today write a poem with some fizz in it. (76)

There are poems in this mode __ expressing a cynicism towards her craft of poetry alongside profound moving poems as the poem welcoming the birth of a friend‘s daughter or a poem about the old waiting in a home for the aged. ‗For Rita‘s

Daughter, Just Born‘ utters benediction through a range of images of calm and tranquillity __

Luminous new leaf May the sun rise gently on your unfurling …. …in the courtyard always linger the smell of earth after rain the stone of these steps stay cool and old gods in the niches old brass on the wall never the shrill cry of kites. (73)

183

Similarly in ‗Home for the Aged, Sydney‘ the stark silent solitude of those abandoned is expressed,

Nobody called them. They have no history. … The sun rises and sets, rises and sets.

A Goan Catholic minority in Hindu India, de Souza‘s poems show her assimilation of the cultural variety and philosophical amalgamation of faiths. She is at a critical stance towards aspects of her community in poems such as ‗Catholic Mother‘ in her first volume Fix:

Father X. D‘Souza Father of the year. Here he is top left the one smiling. By the Grace of God he says

we‘ve had seven children (in seven years). We‘re One Big Happy Family God Always Provides India will Suffer for her Wicked Ways (these Hindu buggers got no ethics) Pillar of the Church says the parish priest Lovely Catholic Family says Mother Superior the pillar‘s wife says nothing. (de Souza 1997:39)

The critique is feminist. In poem V of the poem sequence ‗Return‘, in Learn from the

Almond Tree, she presents a sequence of vignettes of her homeland India after returning from the West. She writes of the underside of the great male philosopher poets such as Tukaram.

Tuka, forgive my familiarity I have loved your pithy verses 184

Ever since that French priest Everyone thought mad recited them … You made life hard for your wife And I'm not sure I approve of that. Nor did you heed her last request: Come back soon. (80)

Hari M G and Komalesha HS note in their article, ‗Eunice de Souza's poetry‘:

While she appreciates the radical spirituality of the Bhakti poet and differentiates it from the ritualism of institutionalized Hinduism ('the priests do not sound like you/ but I will offer a coconut anyway/ for someone I love'), she has reservations regarding Tukaram's attitude towards his wife. (Hari M G and Komalesha HS Web)

Here too, de Souza‘s critique is feminist. De Souza thus cuts through the differences of religion not only to access universal spiritual truths, but also to critique the lacunae left by patriarchy in all religions.

The Goan Catholic community surfaces in poems all through her oeuvre. The poet is at odds with its narrow minded rigidities just as Kamala Das is at odds with the expectations of her community. Poems such as ‗General Ward‘ and ‗Bequest‘, in the

1990 volume, Ways of Belonging reveal this. The women in ‗General Ward‘ are judgemental,

Imagine, she hasn‘t visited her mother for three days! What kind of daughter. Simple Christian sentiments, simply kindly people... How shall I say to them: in your simple words I hear the subtle joy of the guilt trip, the guilt whip? (89)

In ‗Bequest‘ she describes how

In every Catholic house there‘s a picture of Christ holding his bleeding heart in his hand. I used to think, ugh and concludes with irony, It‘s time to perform an act of charity 185

to, bequeath the heart, like a spare kidney __ preferably to an enemy. (88)

Fellow poet and critic, Anjum Hassan states that:

Eunice De Souza‘s position as a sympathetic ironist is connected not just with her immediate aims as a poet but with her larger convictions as a feminist. The collection is called A Necklace of Skulls but is de Souza really Kali? I think not. Plath (―I eat men like air,‖ etc.) is a more convincing Kali, whereas in the de Souza poem in which the phrase ‗necklace of skulls‘ occurs she has only ventured as far as jokily terrorising bank managers. Kali and Medusa (―Remember Medusa, / who could not love/ even herself?‖), are figures who represent the full force of female rage. They can be invigorating reminders but they do not enter the fibre of de Souza‘s poems in the way that an idea of feminism as solidarity and sisterhood does. (Hasan Web)

In the poem titled ‗For S. Who Wonders if I Get Much Joy Out of Life‘, she writes,

As a Matter of fact I do I contemplate, with a certain grim satisfaction dynamic men who sell butter. Sometimes I down a Coke implacably at the Taj. This morning I terrorized (successfully) the bank manager. I look striking in red and black and a necklace of skulls. (56)

The necklace of skulls is a trendy modern trinket. In terms of poetic symbolism it is associated with the necklace of skulls worn by the goddess Kali. This poem, in her second volume Women in Dutch Painting (1988) is one among an increasing number of poems where the rage and anguish of personal life is shown to be tempered by an acceptance of life. That she makes this phrase the title of a collection that comprises her output from 1979 to 2008 __ three decades of poetry __ indicates the ambivalent nature of the necklace of skulls that is now just a piece of modern jewellery.

Throughout de Souza‘s poetry the natural world of trees, hills, rivers, of creatures 186 such as the crow, have had a recurring presence. In her most recent volume, Learn from the Almond Leaf the natural world becomes guide but not in Wordsworth‘s sense. The lesson that the almond leaf teaches in the title poem ‗Learn from the

Almond Leaf‘, is after all, that ‗flamboyance is all‘.

Eunice de Souza‘s contribution to modern Indian English poetry by women has been to take the confessional mode and turn it on its head with self- reflexive irony. A single woman, a Goan Catholic, she had arrived bearing a different perspective, a different history. Her poetry about the self has validated the single woman. Her critique of family, and her love for family has helped show up the family for what it is, and not as an idealized unit. Her irony, humour and at times rage and grief, her observances (that many Indian women are like the women in Dutch paintings, for instance) show what poetry can do even when it is scathing, satiric or ironic. Candid expression of emotions of love, of love ending, of the nature of the poetic craft make her a voice to reckon with. And as the previous chapter has discussed, her presence in the poetry circuit of Bombay, her students who have become poets, her anthologies, and criticism make her a vital part of Indian English poetry today. There is scarcely an anthology that does not include her poems.

In Continuities in Indian English Poetry: nation, language, form, G J V

Prasad cites Mamta Kalia‘s poetry alongside Eunice de Souza‘s ‗Catholic Mother‘ to suggest that modern ‗women poets have consistently questioned middle-class India and articulated a different vision‘. (Prasad 89)

In her selection of three poets for Quest (74) in 1974, Eunice de Souza chooses poems by Kamala Das, Gauri Deshpande, and Mamata Kalia. Of Mamta Kalia she writes:

Mamta Kalia is the newest arrival. She is a youngish woman who lives in Allahabad, writes in both Hindi and English, and is already well known as a poet and a short story writer in Hindi. Her first book of poems in English, 187

Tribute to Papa, published in 1970, is a good first book. There are no weak poems among the twenty included in the selection, and even the slight ones display Mamta Kalia's characteristic qualities: warmth, gaiety, and a kind of spiky wit.

The poems range in subject matter from purely subjective eccentricities: I want to pay Sunday visits totally undressed... ( Compulsions) to social criticism: Give up all hope Ye that enter the Kingdom of Government Service ... (Hell) The language is direct, swift-moving, ironic, as in ‗Sheer Good Luck‘: But nothing ever happened to me except two children and two miscarriages ... (Sheer Good Luck.) (Peeradina 84-5)

Mamta Kalia born in the same year as Eunice de Souza is the first poet from

North India to be discussed here. She is one of the nine poets in de Souza‘s anthology

Nine Indian Women Poets. A 1971 review of Mamta Kalia‘s Tribute to Papa and

Other Poems published by Writers Workshop, Calcutta in 1970 states ,

Mamta Kalia's ability to seize moments and facets of experience, the uncommonness of commonality, and give it significance through a penetrating, climactic expression is the real strength of her poetry. In this collection of twenty poems Kalia attempts to articulate the intelligent and sensitive woman's predicament in relation to parents, family, profession, society - the outer life. She also expresses the psychic inner compulsions of love and marriage in a form which displays an excellent combination of the subjective with the objective. (Shahane 738)

In an interview with Eunice de Souza in Talking Poems, Kalia says how Nissim

Ezekiel‘s response to her first poems, and his recommendation to P Lal who published

Tribute to Papa set her book off on a good path. She also tells de Souza, ‗Your review of Tribute to Papa helped as well, Eunice‘. (de Souza 1999: 58) The tone of the title poem, ‗Tribute to Papa‘ builds as it progresses; the father who is called ‗angel‘ in the opening lines turns out to be a man whose idealism would make him want to abort his wayward daughter‘s love child. And if she refused the father would ‗at once think of 188 suicide‘. (10) The fact that this poem came to be highly anthologised and the reviews for this volume were all positive, shows how in the 1970s, certain taboos were breaking and things about female lives and sexuality were coming out in the open.

Unlike Plath‘s ‗Daddy‘ poem Kalia‘s poem shows an aggressively rebellious daughter who will ‗disown‘ him. It is ironic that the rage expressed towards the father in this poem, is shown to taper off into the tame acceptance of the married state, where the speaker can only express her dissatisfaction and regret at her condition but does not threaten or revolt. Both Deshpande and Kalia critique the ennui of middle class marriages, de Souza indicates the harmless squabbles in her poem ‗Guide to a Well-

Behaved Parrot‘ in Learn from the Almond Leaf when she describes the depredations of her pet parrot,

Damn that book. Damn that bird. Another packet of cigs lies in shreds on the floor. Show who‘s boss, the book says. I shout at him. He shouts back. Really, I may as well have been married. (35)

In Kalia the critique of marriage is not an accusation of the spouse but a comment on the demands of middle-class life that leaves little room for pleasure. And in a society where terrible things are happening to women all the time, the speaker‘s own situation does not even allow room for complaint it would seem. This is demonstrated in ‗Sheer

Good Luck‘ in the Tribute to Papa volume,

So many things could have happened to me. I could have been kidnapped at the age of seven and ravaged by dirty-minded middle-aged men. I could have been married off 189

to a man with bad smell and turned frigid as a frigidaire. I could have been an illiterate woman putting thumb prints on rent receipts. But nothing ever happened to me except two children and two miscarriages. (11)

Many of Kalia‘s poems in this volume and the next one are on middle-class woes, but this poem at the opening of her first volume sets the perspective for what is to follow.

It also consciously points at the classist assumptions of poets and readers of Indian

English poetry. The poem has been read outside India as a comment on the horrific condition of Indian women.25 The awareness of less fortunate women has been found in some of Kamala Das‘s poems too, and in de Souza‘s poems, not only about Goan

Catholic girls and wives but also about devadasis who chose to pursue education in the teeth of aggressive jeers. De Souza‘s poem V in the poem sequence ‗Return‘, the last poem in Women in Dutch Painting (1988) addresses:

Sarla Devi, Kusum Bala, Rani Devi, all of ill fame. I read your story in the morning paper: you refuse to wear ankle-bells worn for generations you study law you hear catcalls in the street drums and bells behind your books. Sitting alone in a Bombay restaurant, listening to the innuendoes of college clerks and a loose-slipped Spanish priest. I know something of how you feel. (79) The plight of the less fortunate is a constant motif in the poets from Naidu to the present. What is remarkable is that in the 1970s when the poetic trend was inward turning, and poets were writing about the self, the plight of the less fortunate seems to 190 have struck a resonance. If de Souza writes of struggling women, ‗I know something/of how you feel‘, the irony of Kalia‘s poem, especially its title, ‗Sheer

Good Luck‘ is an admission of her own privileged position. The poet / speaker‘s awareness of her singularity, the difference of her perspective is something that is another constant feature found in Kamala Das, de Souza and Kalia, for instance

Kalia‘s ‗Viewpoint‘ in Tribute to Papa:

I was born upside down and I‘m very proud of it. Not that I walk on my head or talk with my toes but I swear I feel comfortable in the world as it is. … Once I did stand up but I found everything down: prices, politics, love. So I stood on my head again and struck a tidy bargain. (13)

The poet‘s inverted (critical) gaze is turned upon her profession as well, for instance the teacher who teaches from books only, clueless about the real thing, as in the poem,

‗Dedicated Teacher‘ in the same collection:

It seems funny at times __ I‘ve rarely seen a mountain, a forest or a river, yet I teach geography. (22)

She also questions the absurdity of career linked ‗research‘ in the same poem:

I‘m working for a PhD these days. Even if I know I‘ll never complete the thesis, never mind, that I‘m registered is enough. I‘ll talk my lungs out about it. it‘s all to wangle a Readership, you see. The University needs me. (22)

Workplace woes recur in Kalia‘s poetry. ‗Hell‘ describes a Kafkaesque world : you go on working, 191

with a lurking fear they‘ll throw you out if they detect you going wrong somewhere, or right everywhere. … Very soon they‘ll put you there where the ventilation is poor … There, a pigeon hole awaits you: ―Give up all hope Ye that enter the Kingdom of Government Service‖. (23)

Eunice de Souza‘s novel Dangerlok (2001) elaborates on the theme in great contextual detail. Kalia is the first person in Indian English poetry to write on this theme.

If professional life is oppressive and bleak, the home is no better. Therefore the disconnect between the English teacher‘s cache of words and phrases prove to be ironic and irrelevant, as in Mamta Kalia‘s poem titled ‗Seize the Day‘:

Days stubbed in the ash-tray Days devoid of everything except distractions Days with unimaginative names … Days… When… … nothing endures Except dyspepsia and dysphoria. (27)

The poem pits the vocabulary of an erudite English speaker seeking the infinite spaces of the imagination imbibed through a study of literature, through use of the term

‗seize the day‘, the English derivative of the Latin carpe diem, against the realities of daily living on local Indian soil. Kalia wrote this in 1970, a while before postcolonial discourse had begun to query the nature and validity of English studies in India. A similar rejection of old points of reference is expressed in the poem ‗New Deal‘ where she writes,

Let‘s live all over again; 192

find new contexts with new references. Let‘s change our texts. (18)

The idea is to make the husband stop seeking perfect beauty in other women, and herself stop recalling potential idyllic romance with, ‗the guy who walked with me/Heaven knows how many miles on that lonely beach‘. Then follows the tongue-in cheek irony, the impossibility of escape,

Let‘s forget our horrors-in-law your ―never enough‖ salary my ―never enough‖ needs. Let‘s forget the doctor‘s bills, and the grocer‘s and the launderer‘s. In short let‘s forget the proverbial thorn and smell the proverbial rose. (18)

Here again Kalia takes apart the idea of marital romance alluding first to the ‗New

Deal‘, a British coinage promising workers better wages and satirised by Shaw, and then to the proverbs. Conjugal joy is marred by harsh realities. Romance before marriage was possible and preferable to the poet as she notes in ‗Dubious Lovers‘,

I‘d live you as a Saturday night memory or a voice over the telephone; I‘d feel close to you then. (19)

But the partner had desired otherwise, ‗But you insist on your presence‘. Now married, she states with a touch of wry humour,

… when I want you to write verses on me you only compose limericks, and when you suggest we dine out, I quickly get busy with its finances. (19)

Conjugal romance is not the only thing that is thrown open to scrutiny; reality subverts the ideas that are the diet of those in India raised on English literature. As teacher who earns her bread by teaching English literature in India, Kalia declares in the poem ‗Against Robert Frost‘, 193

I can‘t bear to read Robert Frost Why should he talk of apple-picking When most of us can‘t afford to eat one? (21)

The revolt thus questions marriage, English education, and parents. Not just ‗Papa‘ but the mother too is turned upon, ironically through the umbilical cord:

Looking at my navel I‘m reminded of you, Mamma. How I lay suspended By that cordial cord inside you. I must have been a rattish thing, A wriggly roll of shallow breath. You, perhaps, were hardly proud Of your creativity __ Except for the comfort That I looked like Papa And not like the neighbour Who shared our bathroom. (20)

Eunice de Souza has noted ‗the way the poems work with apparent blandness towards unexpected endings‘. Here too the last line delivers a blow, an implication that the child suspects something about her paternity. But the poem‘s title __ ‗Brat‘__ belies the punch line, and introduces an ambivalence.

After the rebellious energy of the preceding poems the poem ‗Matrimonial

Bliss‘ (Tribute to Papa), comes as a closure and suggests instead, the speaker‘s need for aches to complain about:

After years of yearning, ( If I felt poetic, I‘d add ―burning‖) Now that I‘ve come back to you, With all of me intact, You have no need of me, You know where‘s your towel, your slippers, your toothpicks. (30)

The old rebel is visible under the surface of the present aging woman whose language describes her reluctant resignation to the present state of things,

I feel all disjointed inside, But the moment I hear your footsteps, I put all of me together And give you my best smile 194

That‘s eternally saying cheese. I want to develop a hobby Like doll-making or fabric-painting, But I feel so old in my hands. Just sitting I am so tired I can‘t even sit pretty. (30)

The husband is the one the poem is addressed to; in the fatigue of middle age, the vestiges of warmth become a ‗smile‘ ‗that‘s eternally saying cheese‘. But there is also a clinging to the symptoms of ageing as a refuge from the world, Of late

I‘ve started yawning too much, And watching my nails not grow. I‘ve also developed gas trouble and amenorrhoea, But I don‘t want to tell you Or you‘ll send for a doctor And rob me even of these. (30)

In fact the volume of poems Tribute to Papa moves from the anger of the daughter to the complaints of the wife and ends with a poem that moves beyond the woes of middle-class women to something sadder. It is the anguish of the poor rural girl child in a big city __ a have-not in a book that has so far expressed middle-class female angst.

Who will buy me a banana in this large unfriendly town Who will come and ask, ―Are you tired Are you hungry? Does no one love you? Where do you live?‖ Perhaps no one They are all busy in their business They‘ve no time for a girl, dark and skinny, Who is twelve but looks much younger. (31)

The book appeared in 1970. The poem reflects the society of the 1960s; the last line

‗twelve but looks much younger‘ conveys, without spelling it out, the sad economics of deprivation and difference that stunts the growth of children in India.

The next lines achieve a double edged meaning, as the twelve year old says.

I want to shout in the middle of the road, 195

―I have a name; I‘m Sheela, I‘ve studied four classes in a Prathamik Shala. Once I went to a picnic and drank Coca-Cola, I can roll excellent chapatis, I recognize Chacha Nehru in all photographs, I have two younger brothers who call me tāyee, I am my mother‘s pet, I am, I am. But who will hear if I say all this? In this large unfriendly town Who will say, ―Don‘t cry.‖ (31)

This last poem shows a girl who does not accuse the mother, but claims ‗I am my mother‘s pet. / I am, I am‘. There is tenderness towards the younger brothers who call her ‗elder sister‘ or tāyee. There is the innocent declaration of modernity ‗Once I went to a picnic and drank Coca-Cola‘, the declaration of a capability __ ‗I can roll excellent chapatis‟ __ that is beyond middle class children and many middle-class women too. ‗I recognize Chacha Nehru in all photographs‘ is uttered like another naïve declaration of citizenship. These lines subvert the status quo in the same manner as Kamala Das‘s poem ‗An Introduction‘ subverts contemporary politics in its opening lines with

I don't know politics but I know the names Of those in power, and can repeat them like Days of week, or names of months, beginning with Nehru.

That poem had captured the voice of a woman caught too early in marriage and pregnancy. That poem was the voice of a middle-class female rebel. It had appeared in the volume Summer in Calcutta (1965) Kalia‘s poem appearing five years later seems to re-vision Das‘s poem by shifting the speaker‘s voice from urban middle- class womanhood to rural/suburban girlhood at a loss in a strange town. The child wants to eat, a simple village snack, a banana, but cannot get one, ‗Who will buy me a banana in this large unfriendly town‘. As the child states her name and her education level, it becomes clear to the Indian reader that she is most likely a child servant, one of countless little girls, who are sent by their families to earn a living as maid in the 196 towns and cities. Then, the child‘s assertion that she is her mother‘s pet becomes clear. The mother had loved her; the parents had educated her for a few years at the local school, and then sent her to the town. She is the eldest, her brothers will benefit from her earnings. This is all between the lines. Had she been lost she would have cried for her family. She is hungry and in the middle of the road. Kalia does not explain how the twelve year came to be in the middle of the road. Thus the volume

Tribute to Papa that begins with an English educated aspiring daughter who hates her father for not being rich, among other things, concludes with this girl child‘s voice.

That she states her name ―I have a name; I‘m Sheela‖ only drives home the irony that her name does not matter in the unfriendly town. The poet rhymes ‗Sheila‘ with

‗Cola‘ to show up her commodity value. The title of the poem ‗Self Pity‘ actually mocks the preceding poems for their tone of self-pity. And the Papa of the book‘s title here seems to be society itself that turns away from the hungry child. Kalia‘s understated minimalist presentation in this poem shows the legacy of Kamala Das being taken forward, reworked and revised.

Kalia‘s next and last volume Poems‟78 appeared in 1979, again from Writers

Workshop. Here the complaining middle class voice is no longer simply grumbling about the erosion of happiness with the rising cost of living, but actually blaming the government for it. The first poem, I Do Feel National‘, states,

I do feel national When I sing the National Anthem. So what if my mind keeps nagging me ―What have you to boast of ? ‖ A dingy hole, a bug-ridden bed. Two cracked bits of crockery, three threadbare saris, A roll of paper that‘s called a degree. ( 7)

The next lines with their laboured rhyme, achieving a childish jingle effect seem to be self-mocking: 197

In the name of Freedom I‘ve been fooled not once but twice. Let it suffice, They in Delhi do not know What it is to live like mice. I‘ll ever be a rebel As long as I don‘t get Sugar, Dalda and Kerosene oil At fair price. (7)

The 1960s saw marches by women, middle class women on the streets, waving brooms and clanging buckets, sloganeering against price rise. The childish rhyme continues,

I‘ll always be the sty In Establishment‘s cool eye, (7) and is broken suddenly by the non-rhyming next and final line __

As long as I‘m made to linger and not live. (7)

It is as though commodity shortage, price-rise and unemployment (‗A roll of paper that‘s called a degree‘) have kept the speaker in a state of arrested development.

‗Linger‘ is an adolescent state, a pre-adult state where one ‗rebels‘, contrasted to

‗live‘ where one gets on with the business of growth, marriage , children, household, family‘, not a makeshift single person‘s accommodation, ‗A dingy hole, a bug-ridden bed. / Two cracked bits of crockery‘. Later in the same volume, Poems‟78, in a four line poem ‗I Write‘ she says,

I write Because I cannot bite It‘s the way The weak ones fight. (16)

And this confession changes into a new realization, that protest, even on paper is futile, that one should go for quick rewards instead, as in the poem ‗In my hour of

Discontent‘ where she says ,

In my hour of discontent 198

I neither shout nor rant. I simply fill ink in my pen And spill it with intent. But now I‘m fed up Using my pen like sword. Creating at best only verbal discord. I want neither paper nor board. Give me something to hoard In cash or kind O Lord! (17)

The poems in Poems„78 reiterate the issues of marital ennui, bad bosses, the drudgery of housework. Occasionally there is a poem such as ‗After Eight Years of Marriage‘ where the harried daughter on a visit to her parents is asked if she was happy. She wants to scream about her troubles, her despair, the home she shared with many in- laws, but she sees her old parents looking at her two sons ‗hopping around like young goats‘ and

Their wrinkled hands, beaten faces and grey eyelashes Were all too much too real. So I swallowed everything, And smiled a smile of great content. (26)

At such times the rebellious voice seems to have matured into acceptance and resignation. Kalia‘s poetry records not the dramatic tragedies of a bad marriage as many of Kamala Das‘s poems do, but the sheer decay of the self through daily demands of a normative family. Long before Indian feminism began to chart women‘s contribution to society through housework, Kalia charted it in her poetry. ‗My hair held a fragrance once‘, she says in a poem by this title.

A fragrance you associated with so many flowers. But then you got used to it And stopped associating. Now when I lower my head You only see dandruff and grey hair. (25)

To make such matters the subject of poetry seems like a rejoinder to the dry observations on marriage and wife we find in Ezekiel‘s poetry, for instance. The 199 complaints about the state of her body and her spirit are without rancour, as is evident in the poem ‗Love Made a Housewife Out of Me‘ where she presents the wife‘s as well as the husband‘s side of the story. The situation presented in the poem was something that educated women in India and elsewhere were experiencing in the

1960s, and still do although there is now more recognition of the tight rope balancing that women working outside the home do, or the self-devaluation that women opting for full time home-making submit to. Most of these poems are addressed to the spouse,

Love made a housewife out of me. I came with a degree in Textile Designing, Skill in debates, dramatics and games (You can see my certificates.) I measured thirty four-twenty-thirty four. Once I even modelled for a leading firm. You too had admired my costly skin then. That was in courtship, years ago. I now have a house Full of you and your world. Unmade beds, dirty linen. (20)

If Kamala Das had expressed marital angst, Kalia expresses menopausal angst, not just middle-class but mid-life crises. And all of this grounded in the real-time real- place reality of her contemporary India. That such stuff could be put into poetry was debatable in the 1960s and 70s in India, although things such as unwashed dishes, and soiled nappies were appearing in feminist protest art in America in the ‗70s.26 But here in India, in small town Allahabad, that has been Kalia‘s home, such matters, even in poetry, were simply not acceptable. Kalia tells Eunice de Souza, in Talking Poems:

Conversations with Poets,

Life for an educated, liberated, outspoken individual who happens to be a woman is not easy. You may equip yourself academically, professionally, but you cannot hope others will move at the same pace. (60-1)

200

She says in the poem, ‗I Must Write Nicely Now‘,

Not about my nightmares But about my dreams.

But the poem moves on to show that there are no dreams:

Do you dream at thirty-seven Or scream? Neither. Life suddenly turns turtle. You seem to say, ― It‘s fine and I‘m okay.‖ (18)

In a conversation with Eunice de Souza, Kalia says,

My two volumes of English poems were not welcomed by my Hindi readers and friends. They said I was moving towards anarchy and nihilism‘ (Talking Poems, 59)

In Eunice de Souza‘s Talking Poems, Mamta Kalia also says how Tribute to Papa was a rejection of relationships, and that by the time of her second volume she felt that,

contradictions in society were more critical and more important than personal contradictions and failures. Women are burnt and raped. Dowry demands still exist. Instead of talking about post-modernism, we should talk about post- barbarism. Much needs to done with a pen. But change is slow in this way. I have activist friends who stage dharnas, or take action of some kind, make a noise. Writing takes a hundred years to create a ripple. (60)

Kalia has survived the test of time unlike Deshpande who too was published by

Writers Workshop. Eunice de Souza‘s approval has seemed to make a difference; also that the poems are rooted in the local unlike Deshpande‘s poetry that raises the concrete and local to the abstract.

Tara Patel is almost a decade younger than Mamta Kalia. Her only book of poems, Single Woman appeared in 1991. The title underlines the phenomenon of women, working women living by themselves. An early review titled ‗The Uneasy

Tapestry‘ in Kavya Bharati 4, 1992, Ayyappa Paniker and Chandraka B state:

Tara Patel seems to be obsessively preoccupied with the situation of 201

an unmarried woman … The autobiographical strain is perhaps pardonable. The woman who suffers and the mind which creates are so closely identified here that the theoretical tools of literary criticism are no longer relevant. What Tara Patel has to say is said without disguise or deception. Loneliness, or rather alone-ness, is the recurring theme in these poems written during the past 20 years. (113)

Another review, by John Oliver Perry, also in 1992, is scathing about her viewpoint and that of many other women poets and does not even attempt any evaluation of the poetry. There is tasteless commentary on the poet‘s life and patronizing advice:

Though clearly she does not feel unique in this experience, she acts as if she were irrevocably alone, having no intimation of additional sources of strength, for example, through sisterhood; the "other woman" is merely the winner, the owner of the man. Comparisons with similarly conflicted, afflicted and self- victimizing, supposedly liberated female poets like Kamala Das, perhaps Eunice DeSouza and Imtiaz Dharkar, are inevitable. Patel comes off as speaking more directly of sexual frustrations, less concerned to make those experiences comment on ethnic or cultural patterns. Perhaps that is because, in fact, after spending her first twenty years in Malaysia, she has been more of an outsider alone in Bombay than most single, professional, urban Indian women today. If she were to probe her life in poetry with more commitment to craft, she might create a more liberated consciousness beyond victimization. (Perry 1992, 404)

In fact both reviews one by a male critic in India, and the other by a male critic in the

USA focus on the biographical rather than the literary aspect of Patel‘s work. One is reminded of Kamala Das‘s words, ‗I must extrude autobiography‘ in the poem

‗Composition‘. Panniker and Chandraka at least concede that,

The woman who suffers and the mind which creates are so closely identified here that the theoretical tools of literary criticism are no longer relevant. What Tara Patel has to say is said without disguise or deception. (113)

It is Eunice de Souza‘s inclusion of none less than five Patel‘s poems from Single

Woman in Nine Indian Women Poets (1997) along with the statement that, ‗This anthology includes poets who I feel have extended both the subject matter and the idiom of poetry‘, (5) canonizes Patel. In the note on Tara Patel, in this anthology, de

Souza comments, 202

In its own way, Single Woman is a brave book. It cannot have been easy to write poems in which the speakers express need so openly, unsheltered by irony. (de Souza 1997: 89)

‗Woman‘ the first poem in the book, strikes the note for what is to follow in the rest of the book. ‗Woman' had first appeared in The Indian P.E.N. Issue 50, in 1989.

‗Woman‘ is also a much anthologised poem, its lines frequently quoted.

A woman‘s life is a reaction to the crack of a whip. She learns to dodge it as it whistles around her. (Patel 9)

A woman is someone who

ran away to live as an escaped convict, or a refugee, or a yogi in the wilderness of civilization. (Patel 9)

Patel‘s poems rise above the narrowly personal to formulations on the general condition of women. There is a frank admission of the stark reality of the female condition, which is that of the convict, yogi or refugee, in other words, the marginalized, the detached, the alienated. The poem ‗Of Dreams, Gods and

Goddesses‘ has a mythological quality as it traces the hardening of the woman‘s soul, the freezing of her dreams and feelings, until she is a ‗subterranean river in the dark‘, whose ‗dreams jut out like rocks‘. (11-12)

Tara Patel‘s poetry rarely displays the ironic stance of Kalia, or de Souza, nor do they announce war, or try to use poetry like a sword. Yet they do not lapse into the abject. She says in ‗Now and Then‘,

You want to talk to someone. You want to talk to talk to someone seriously, quietly, without the distraction of getting angry, or crying, or touching, You don‘t want to beg. You want to talk to someone, not confidentially, not in private: the whole world must listen in. 203

You want to talk to someone because silence is a kind of suicide‘. (10)

The poem then lists the dreams of this person,

You want to be 18, hike up a hill, kiss beneath a lime tree in the light ….You want to eat oranges, try dodging raindrops, make clouds in your coffee. (10)

Yet these simple dreams cannot be shared, the loneliness persists, until the silence becomes a habit,

You want to talk and talk to someone other than yourself. In the end, you don‘t want to talk to anyone, You want to keep quiet. You want someone to talk to you! (10)

By now, in the 90s, feminist scholarship had exposed the patriarchal conditioning that shapes women‘s dreams and aspirations. In ‗Of Dreams, Gods and Goddesses‘

Patel shows how the new generation of women, aware of this emotional conditioning, strive to break away from predetermined roles, but it is a futile struggle:

You feel trapped in your dream. A dream fabric woven by the gods and goddesses of your mind. The more you want out ___ of being someone‘s daughter, of dreaming of being someone‘s wife, of trying to be independent, the more your dreams close in on you to make a killing, You dream in a system programmed to punish you. (11)

Patel had published Single Woman in the 1990s when poets younger to her by half a decade or more were appearing on the scene. In 2001, Bruce King published a

‗revised edition‘ of his 1987 book Modern Indian Poetry in English. As is mentioned in the Preface to this revised edition, King did not make any alterations in the original 204 book, he simply added all the new material as 5 new chapters to the older 13 chapters and called it ‗Part 2‘. Chapter XVII in Part 2, in the revised edition is titled, ‗New

Women Poets: Shivdasani, Patel, D‘Souza, Sambrani, Dharker, Divakurni, Bhatt‘. Of these poets, Shivdasani‘s book of poems Nirvana at Ten Rupees appeared in 1990, a year before Tara Patel‘s Single Woman. (1991) Shivdasani‘s book has, among other themes such as urban squalor, ‗drugs, sex, bad food‘ , ‗the horrors and temptations of living alone in a small flat, the anxieties of a single life, which were complicated by being a woman‘. (King. 313) King also notes a progression, ‗an implied autobiographical narrative‘ as the poems move ‗chronologically beyond the schoolgirl and the working woman alone in a flat to a home owner and mother‘. (King 315) In

Tara Patel‘s Single Woman, there is no such progression. ‗To Be Alive‘ is a poem of quiet despair; there is no rage, simply a statement of the facts of life __

The world is not your oyster . . . ‗The pecking order is alive and kicking, Someone picks up a stone, another follows (13) and in an allusion to Sylvia Plath‘s The Bell Jar Patel writes, ‗Ambitions dry up on the tree of life‘. Patel does not blame a man, or men only,

The tongues of men and women are lined with thorns. To preserve their own vulnerability at the cost of another‘s. (11) of the situation and the speaker‘s nadir of desperation is stated quietly too:

Each saving grace turns to straw. You need a new reason every day to be alive. (13)

‗Birthday Notes 1983‘ is a candid stocktaking. Tara Patel admits that rebellion against oppressive tradition, and the exercise of choice in way of life, the chosen 205 independence has been like a temporary escape, a sleep from which she has had to return to the harsh reality of loneliness.

You think the world owes you a living, it does not, it does not even work for you. At the first evidence of evil you shut your eyes and did a Rip Van Winkle. Now in the noonday heat of your 30s, it challenges you like an unearthly animal (14) about to charge. You live in perpetual insomnia!‘

In a later stanza she writes,

You tell yourself at 34 it is not too late to learn. That life is mortal, comparatively mortal. You‘re not the only one deprived of God‘s gifts to mankind. (15)

In 1991 when this poem appeared, Tara Patel, born in 1949, was 34. The autobiographical reference point here, and in the rest of the book are the only biographical material on this poet. Unlike the other poets who have spoken in interviews about their craft and their life, Tara Patel has chosen to turn away from it all. In Nine Indian Women Poets Tara Patel has only four sentences as bio-note:

Born 1949. Tara Patel was educated in Gujarat and Malaysia. She is a freelance journalist and columnist. Single Woman, her first book, was published in 1992. (89)

In the poem ‗Single Woman‘ from which the book takes its title, the speaker mentions temporary relationships with a series of married men as a

rosary of crumbs. Other women‘s men offer you love in rationalised crumbs. (Patel 18)

That this is the outcome of a choice made against tradition, against marriage is evident in the poem, 206

Anyone can tell you stupidity is not an art form to be practised. Yet you have made yourself at home in hell, waiting for a man to come naked and with no price tags attached. (Patel 18)

In the 80s and 90s in cities such as Bombay there were couples in live-in relationships, but it was and still is, taboo in India, despite legalization in 2010. Tara

Patel does not reside in India, nor does she participate in the network of collaborations, interviews, publication and poetry reading circuits that seem essential to the practice today. De Souza writes in Nine Indian Women Poets,

Nissim Ezekiel who is in touch with the poet when she comes to Bombay, says that Tara Patel is convinced she is not a poet‘. Such self-doubt, according to de Souza can only come to real poets ‗the genuine article‘. (89)

‗Of Things‘ by Patel expresses once again the series of relationships that produce a golden season,

The summer comes to a close in bursts of gold labarnum and scarlet gul mohur, leaving a sky pregnant with clouds. Things shimmer, glow in a luminescent light. Life‘s a halcyon bubble. (Patel 19)

At the close of summer

You stand at another crossroad demanding another pound of flesh. (19)

There is a price to pay at each crossroad, ‗you grow bloodless‘ as

People like flash-floods leave a brief spring in their wake, a gold and scarlet summer. You quench your thirst on memories till they grow bone thin and dry. (19)

Patel‘s poetry expresses the condition of being single as a form of modern choice and follows it through its series of ‗summers‘ and the ultimate loneliness of old age and death. This is not the loneliness of the widow or the mother abandoned by her children in old age that we find in Kamala Das‘s poetry. Tara Patel‘s Single Woman is 207 bleak testimony of a bold and brave life-choice made by women for whom the compromises of marriage are unacceptable too. In ‗A kind of Freedom‘ she wonders if she can ever experience being ‗in love‘

this alien magic so much part of other people‘s lives,

and says how it is taboo,

But you are cursed by your parents __ you cannot love voluntarily. (29)

Of Things‘ takes this journey to its culmination as after each relationship the speaker takes ‗another road.

Thinking that all roads now are no future roads. That the mind too grows old parting with each pound of flesh. The rain washes you clean of every bloodstained desire. (19)

This is a life choice that cannot be undone. The women in Indian society who opt for such independence are still ostracized and there is seldom any returning to marriage and family. So the woman moves on,

Till you are an empty shell with the roar of the sea buried far away in it. Beyond retrieving (19)

until she reaches the end.

Through silvergreen springs and goldscarlet summers and cocoons of numbness when it rains, there is the last cul-de-sac of them all, of death‘. (19-20)

The poem following this in the Single Woman volume is titled ‗Request‘ where the speaker begs a former lover to meet for lunch ‗for old times sake … I‘ll pay the bill‘.

The poem repeats the request saying 208

I will not bore you with details of how I lived for months after your exit. But because I‘m pining for an old pleasure, have lunch with me one of these days. I miss you most when I‘m eating alone. … Have lunch with me , I‘ll pay the bill. (21-22)

Apart from the abjectness displayed, there is also the double meaning of the offer ‗I‘ll pay the bill‘ __ the woman is the one seeking the man, and she is financially independent, a new configuration in the courtship game with the roles reversed, yet instead of it being empowering , it is the opposite. The single women in Patel‘s poems are not economically dependent on their lovers; they are educated, financially independent urban women who have been unable to accept the accommodations and compromises required from marriage, and of which we hear complaints in poems by

Kamala Das and Mamta Kalia.27 Patel does not resort to irony and sarcasm but exposes the raw nerve of a corrosive loneliness. The title of the poem alludes to a poem by Kamala Das, ‗A Request‘ in Only the Soul Knows How to Sing, which also expresses the temporariness of love and lust, but unlike Patel‘s poem, Kamala Das‘s tone is not one of abjection but of sharp bitterness ___

When I die do not throw the meat and bones away But pile them up and let them tell By their smell What life was worth On this earth What love was worth In the end. (83)

Both poems mention the corporeality of the body with references to ‗flesh‘, ‘blood‘,

‗meat‘, and ‗bone‘. In both poems may be heard the cry for something beyond bodily desire. Das, Deshpande, de Souza and Tara Patel have this in common as they also 209 share other concerns such as the lives of the deprived, the urban experience, the contentious relationship with parents or spouse or lover/s, the call of the hills, nature, and their own craft of poetry. ‗Basics‘ by Patel expresses the same desperate plea as

‗Request‘,

Call me up and say something. Afterwards I‘ll be content just listening to your silence. (25)

The single woman in Patel‘s book lives an unconventional life, and is assaulted by social scrutiny and disapproval. In ‗Birthday Notes, 1983‘ she writes,

It was not meant to be like this. You wake up daily to a firing squad of questions, itching to spill blood, (Patel 14)

The rejection of conventional marriage and opting for independence had been spurred by what now turns out to be a misdirected romantic idealism:

You dream in a system programmed to punish you, (Patel 11) she writes in ‗Of Dreams, Gods and Goddesses‘. And the punishment is, covert and critical gossip as she writes in ‗Birthday Notes, 1983‘

You ask yourself to understand evil. It is mostly camouflaged activity, the shots are fired backstage. ts genesis is the mind, where the muscles grow __ of doublespeak, and doublespeak follows automatically. (14-5)

So what began as a revolt against parents is now punished by society. And the single woman must also use ‗doublespeak‘. Not only that, there are limits to freedom and idealism as well. 210

In the poem ‗To a Poet from Ghana: (for Kobena Eyi Acquah)‘ the poet describes the experience of bonding with a poet from Ghana she meets at a poetry reading. A racist abuse from someone in the audience is made in Hindi:

Ignoring a crack in the audience, Kalia, tu idhar kya karta hai!* I look at you anew. (30)

The asterisk is a footnote by the poet that says: ‗In Hindi, the sense is derogatory.

‗You nigger, what are you doing here!‘ The poet then describes how she feels desire and love for him and wants to be with him ‗away from all eyes but mine‘. She says to the poet from Ghana,

You tell me I must live on my own terms. I tell you I‘ve lived on my own terms for so long, my permanent address is hell! (31)

The visiting poet leaves and writes a ‗final‘ letter to her

I do fully believe that there are no mere encounters in life. Some we let go, some we downplay, but each encounter with another human being is a potentially revolutionary one. ‗When two lives touch, neither has the right to remain the same‘, (31) he writes. These words suggest the adjustment, conflict and compromise that follow when two lives ‗touch‘, ironically like the conventional marriage that too demands that individuals change. Mamta Kalia‘s poems had been a complaint about the change brought into a romantic relationship after marriage, by the pressures of daily living. In

Patel‘s poems life exerts other pressures upon those who do not conform. Even the rebel single woman admits,

I want to tell you Kobena, I no longer live on my own terms. (30-1)

211

The racist abuse in Hindi, printed in italics in the poem and explained in a footnote, underlines the English language as a language of cultural alienation from the non-

English speaking masses of India. If Nissim Ezekiel had described his alienation as a privilege, riding an ‗elephant of thought‘ ‗a Cezzanne slung around my neck‘, in the poem ‗In India‘, the women poet‘s alienation throws them in conflict and suffering, because married or single, their poetic identity does not protect them from the consequences of their female identities, as single women, independent women, or married women. Modern Indian women‘s poetry in English therefore maps a different terrain, where the poets‘ modern, educated, urban, and economically self-reliant identities have to negotiate the traditional orthodoxies. The poetry expresses this negotiation and thus breaks new ground. Even the urban landscape is felt differently, not gazed and commented on from high up, astride ‗an elephant of thought‘, but with the city reflected in the puddles, as in Tara Patel‘s poem, ‗When It Rains‘:

You walk on mirrors, broken mirrors, the city sprawled about your feet.

A Sylvia Plath-like sense of colour in the lines:

The last gul mohur reds lick your senses into a quiet despair . . . It saturates your consciousness till you wake up on a cold slab of dawn. (33)

‗Trees of Life‘ describes the coconut trees at her parental home, and is uncharacteristic of the collection Single Woman ___

They are a lesson in freedom, so far from their roots, so close to the sky.

And a few stanzas later, 212

They are an impromptu fountain of movement. At 2a.m.in the night when you can hear your heart opening and closing __ you look at them. They are in touch with the sky.

The poet concludes,

You look and look and make up your mind about what is more important. (27-8)

The poet‘s night vigil and the bond with the trees of her parental home in a life of wandering away from home, recall, in different context, Toru Dutt‘s poem ‗Our

Casuarina Tree‘.

There are irreconcilable differences with the mother, just as Mamta Kalia has irreconcilable differences with the father. In ‗Mother‘ the single woman declares,

I cannot live like you, mother, maintain the status quo. I‘ve moved out of square one. I cannot be a dutiful daughter. (Patel, 35)

The daughter reminds the mother she was lucky to have gone abroad after marriage,

(and thus not have to live with in-laws) ‗but you have no respect for luck‘. She grants that her mother‘s ‗discovery of sex was not wonderful‘ and that,

After the mandatory children, the regret over four daughters, you got your son. Sex must have ended with your son. With relief you turned to Ram and Krishna __ fancying yourself to be Sita and Radha. Your husband became an alchoholic. (35)

The daughter cannot accept this sort of marriage made up of the mother‘s

‗virtuousness‘ and the father‘s ‗guilt‘. She tells the mother,

You were programmed not to change. You didn‘t even want to learn English although your husband would have appreciated it. 213

Your daughters were convent educated. (35-6)

In India a convent education signifies, not a religious education, but an English- medium education provided by Christian missionary schools. Thus ‗convent educated‘ in India signifies a good English accent, and a kind westernized modernity.

The mother refuses to change even when she has been ‗around the world‘. The conflict between mother with her ‗mind … moored to the village‘ of her birth, and the convent educated daughter is inevitable:

In the closed circuit of your vision I was your prey. …… Your prayers are like curses nailed on my forehead. Is there no way I can tell you, life is not synonymous with pain? (36)

The daughter will not bear nails on her head, nor will she suffer the mother‘s martyr like stance. To cry, weep, protest, rage is preferable to the daughter. Feminism had done that by the 90s when the book appeared. The daughter says,

I‘m not your disciple. I‘m proud in my own right, although my tears are naked and I‘m making an issue of them. (36)

The parting lines to the mother are,

I may yet get married or go away, die, reincarnate myself elsewhere. May you never have daughters, mother. (35-37)

In an India where the sex ratio is skewed due the preference for male children, where there are dowry-deaths, female foeticide, and discriminatory nutrition, education and empowerment in favour of sons, the ‗modern‘ daughter telling her mother, ‗May you never have daughters, mother‘ becomes an ironic travesty of modernity and change. In the ‗arranged-marriage market‘ (an Indian coinage) a 214 woman‘s complexion is important. Even today in the second decade of the twenty- first century matrimonial columns in newspapers ask for ‗fair complexioned‘ brides.

And the cosmetic market is flooded with ‗skin-whitening creams‘. ‗Complexion‘ shows how the daughter is put under extreme pressure for being 25 and ‗unmarried‘:

Such red-light publicity on my face! Aching evidence of many sexual desires, for I am young and unmarried. An example of locked Indian womanhood. (38-39)

Medications, diets and advice and the ‗salty sting‘ of popular Indian movie songs are the young woman‘s fate. The poetry rises above the personal even as it is articulated through a personalized voice. The poetry is successful as it shows up the anguish of an entire generation of Indian women.

‗Calangute Beach, Goa‘ shows up another side of the situation where despite a signboard saying ‗Nudism is prohibited‘, the white skinned tourists sunbathe nude __

their privacy is natural in a public place. While the Indians having lost their innocence are shy, admiring, jealous.(40)

The modern single woman, who has rejected her mother‘s values, and left home, finds herself out of her depth at this beach,

Truly, here my competence to live is mocked … Enjoyment is as conditional as any other law. (40)

She is torn between ‗common sense and desire‘ as

Usually tight-lipped, now the stars are pinpricks of advice. ‗madness! You cannot go for a walk alone. … The Arabian Sea is a man-eater, rapist, a muscle-powered god. Only the body returns as prasadam. (Patel 40-41)

As the modern Indian single woman ventures among these strangers her ideas on nudity, free love and casual sex are tested: 215

Long hooded waves rise with toothy grins to do homage at my feet. The torch throws spotlights on slopes, mouths, eyes daring me closer. If love is as intimate as hate, an acquired knowledge, a developed taste, my particular reality is fear.

Next morning I pack my bags. (41)

A similar constraint keeps her from getting intimate with an American tourist, in section II of the same poem subtitled ‗For Howard‘. Patel‘s cryptic commentary implies worlds of meaning,

When we met his ‗Hello‘ was quick, mine slow. … Exchanging notes on East and West I asked his name, he didn‘t ask mine. (41)

Howard is ‗amused‘ by the ‗matrimonial ads in Indian newspapers‘, and

His invitation to go swimming naked was turned down. A long brown look accentuated the loneliness of my inhibitions. Both of us knew, there was no time for the persuasions I needed‘. And last of all the farewell, A goodbye can be a hug and ‗Women‘s lib in India is skin-deep, baby. (41-42)

Again this is a situation that is recognizable not as unique but true of hundreds of Indian women at loggerheads with Indian traditions but not quite at home with western modernity. Patel‘s poetry seems to take the stance of rebellion and turn it on its head in these poems; at the same time there is no going back.

In ‗Summer (1976)‘ it is clear that the single woman longs for marriage. Her budget is not big enough for that, but the

Oranges are life- savers, they are all that my money can buy‘. . . . 216

I feast on them with fussy intimacy, the way a woman sometimes feasts on a man‘s presence. (43)

The despair is barely held at bay:

I wish people would bring me their oranges to peel. The many juicy lips of oranges smile at me to mitigate suicide ideas, like burst orange in my mouth. (43)

The summer months with their

gul mohurs…. crowned lavishly with sindoor, They are seasonal monuments of successful marriages. I learn to cry in public without attracting attention. (43)

As the sun scorches her like an ‗MCP‘

the mogras in my garden blow their white breath over me. I stop dreaming of getting married. (43-44)

Without stating it Patel brings in for her Indian readers the association of white with widowhood, in a poem that has stated the association of red flowers with sindoor. If the state of happy marriage is celebratory in India, the state of widowhood is equally punishing. The white mogra‘s fragrance seems to have a reasoning effect on the crying suicidal lonely woman confronted by a summer where all she can afford are a few oranges brought at the VT station in her bag.

The ‗Gul Mohurs‘ by Patel reveals the mix of cultural influences that formed the world of many young persons in metropolitan India in the 1960s onwards. The red gul mohurs that blossom at the height of the Indian summer and redden trees and the ground below reminds the single woman of sindoor: ‗They set me an example‘ The roads lined with gul mohur trees seem to her like ‗open-air cathedral aisles‘ and

My saris and glass bangles cannot compete 217

with the auspicious gul mohur range. (45)

This collage of images, the flowers, saris and bangles from Indian culture, and

‗cathedral aisles‘ evocative of a western ambience is given a new turn in the next line when she says, ‗Mary Quant‘s ‗Blue Blood‘ is an obsession on my lips‘. Mary Quant a British fashion designer of iconic stature who gave the sixties its iconic look of the bobbed hair and the mini skirt, is celebrated in songs of the era. Tara Patel‘s single

Indian woman is clearly raised on trendy western ideas and styles. She describes the flowers overhead as ‗a mantilla propped up in the air‘, which she wants to

strip down and drape… and waltz down Cooperage Road. My wedding day! Blood is a single colour variation. (45)

The colours of red flowers, red sindoor, blood red, blue blood as in the song, create a mix of meanings and sensations as the westernized modern single woman seems to explode in energy and inspiration:

I want to paint gul mohurs the way Van Gogh painted Sunflowers. (46)

The single woman‘s mindscape is revealed as boundless, multicultural and creative.

She represents a segment of Indian youth that was found only in the metropolises in the 1960s but by the ‘80s internet had homogenized the tastes of youth worldwide.

The Dylans released their album, (Don‟t Cut Me Down) Mary Quant in Blue in 1991.

Single Woman in which Tara Patel‘s poem appears was published in 1992.

The poem marks the singular way in which this single woman writes about nature __ original, and quirky. The rapture over the flowers is ecstatic, spiritual,

My eyes are blinkered in one heavenly direction, I turn to stone. A stone prayer. (45-46)

218

Gul mohurs recur in another poem titled ‗Trees of Passion‘ where once again they assault the poet.

The amaltas are sunny, carefree. they leave you alone. You can leave them alone. But the gul mohurs with their cut-throat edges of red can stab you in the back if you make one false move. (59)

If in the earlier poem ‗Gul Mohurs‘ she had stared heavenwards in rapture at the red gulmohurs above, in this poem, ‗Trees of Passion‘, she speaks differently of them,

What do they want? They want your blood for their red on red on red magic, which burns through your illusions … the gul mohurs notch up your life with precise finality. Every summer, every summer , older beyond definition, you wait, for the healing touch of rain.( 59-60)

Yet rain too brings its own punishment, as in the poem ‗When It Rains‘. The gusty rain enters her room like ‗liquid stone‘ and she is shown to

shrink as from shrapnel. Old griefs break open and throb, like evergreen wounds

The last stanza expresses the terrible state of being unable to live either with her parents as a single woman, and unable to live in a city far away from home as a single woman:

You can die when it rains like this. Listening to the rain telling you, you are no longer at home in your parent‘s house, Where life is on hold. How long can a woman‘s life be on hold? Crying is superfluous when it rains. (33-34)

219

Other poems in the volume are equally unabashed ___ the longing for a married man who clearly loves the sandalwood of his wife‘s skin in ‗A Wish at a Party‘, the vengefulness that comes when cast aside by a lover in ‗About-turn‘:

Stay away! I‘m growing claws, and these fangs to put an end to you. You will not survive again, nor, I think, will I. (50)

The experience of a brief sexual encounter with an older man, in ‗Trauma‘

soap and water would not wash away a 25-year difference,

where the young single woman,

Unable to transcend flights of fancy I wondered if you were just a dirty old man I resented but needed for my growth. (51)

The encounter leads to nothing

but a punitive rash of acne berries across my face for the next few days. (52)

Such candid declarations are uncommon even in Indian society to this day.

Apart from the relationships, there is the other aspect of the single woman‘s life in the metropolis that Tara Patel draws with sharp lines:

I have been unemployed as many times as unemployed. And now I am unemployed she writes in the poem ‗In Bombay‘. Here she whiles time away at,

. . . exhibitions, libraries, bookstalls. Movies. Today it was Wait Until Dark for the second time. I am an outsider in an auditorium of college students. (54)

To be out of work, out of money, away from home, and single, is devastating, yet thousands of young people and not so young people live this life, and not just women 220 only. For women it is more difficult as it is compounded by judgemental eyes, and the clock ticking on their hopes of marriage and family. In such circumstances an attack of fever offers ‗clear liquid grief‘ and is, ‗Such weak luxury!‘ she writes in the poem

‗Flu‘. As the fever rages,

In the night, questions and answers tremble through me. Pulling me this way and that till a cumulative truth emerges. Now I love myself but is there anyone to love? (56)

When the fever subsides after a few days, ‗Returning health is returning repression‘.

(56)

‗Tara Patel was educated in Gujarat and Malaysia‘, writes Eunice de Souza of this elusive poet in Nine Indian Women Poets. The poem ‗First Flight‘ in Single

Women celebrates a liberation as ‗speeding 10,000 metres / in the sky‘ she notes,

The picture postcards down below are prisons of our own making… A first flight is a preview of an ultimate freedom. (57)

But from the twelfth floor balcony ‗In a Working Women‘s Hostel‘,

flight is dangerous illusion. Crying is a terminal argument. I return to my room. (61)

In this poem, she asks,

Am I lonely? Or am I a loner? The difference must be resolved quickly now. .. Night brings its own suffering, The rising full moon tells a familiar story. A breeze purrs, inspires fear…(61-2)

This last but one poem in Single Woman seems to progress towards a closure of the rages, and sorrows delineated in the preceding poems. The single woman, alone in her 221 isolated twelfth floor room says, ‗Waking up at night is symptom of aging‘. As she tosses aside the blanket

the touch of my own thighs, breasts, is an embarrassment. In the winter cold I fold myself up in supplication to hear myself more clearly. (62)

The confessional mode is stretched to its limits as Tara Patel‘s single woman states,

Listening to my own confessions is a third degree pastime. I function as a one-woman courtroom. (62)

Her earlier sufferings are now packed away,

I have sealed up my life in black envelops addressed to no one in particular. These envelopes bear inscriptions such as, Confidential. It is the rough wool of a man you want tonight and every night. A woman can feed herself. Love begins with a man. And so on and so on. The colour of bones is in my hair now and I have come to a standstill. The passing days have a posthumous touch to them. (61-62)

So this is where the single woman ends up, in a working women‘s hostel, alone, aged.

The last poem ‗In Passing‘ after the closure like lines in the preceding poem, once again brings to the fore the anguish of a broken heart. The sense of lost opportunities, caused by mutual restraint have led to their own abyss,

I‘ve lived for so many years thinking you will reach out and calm me. But you stopped and I stopped just where the boundaries of the mind stopped __ at the edge of a precipice. (63)

The inner life of imagined love is now no longer possible.

I thought, I thought… my thoughts have always been my downfall. I hoarded them thinking they were kisses, 222

till one kiss too many started a fire and destroyed them all. . . . I‘ve lived for so long in a paradise of thoughts Thoughts which bloom like crystal balls. Just when I look into them they shatter. (63)

The single woman resolutely goes away from a relationship with no future,

I can stay away longer and longer, if I don‘t look at you I won‘t hurt you, or myself. I only wish someone else will love you as much as I do. (63)

To look for Tara Patel‘s life in these poems is of little relevance. Nevertheless, Patel who has been educated in Gujarat and Malaysia has gone away, from India, and from poetry, and from any form of mediatized information is like the speaker in the last poem. Only her poems live on in research papers. Tara Patel never was part of the circuit of poets in Bombay. Single Woman came out from Rupa, Calcutta. Yet individual poems had been published since 1986. Before Eunice de Souza‘s anthology, Patel‘s poetry had been anthologised in Paranjape‘s 1993 anthology.

Patel‘s poetry endures, in discussions, and research papers. Tara Patel‘s poetry is set in India. Unlike poets such as Deshpande, De Souza, Mamta Kalia, whose location as professors with multiple books, and a professional life where poetry is firmly embedded, Tara Patel has just the one book, Single Woman, yet this one book encompasses a wide spectrum of concerns that had not been addressed in Indian

English women‘s poetry earlier. The anonymity of a single woman living alone in a flat or a hostel, voice of the anonymous ‗other woman‘ are new subjects, as is the candid confession about multiple relationships, and a sexuality outside the regulations of marriage. Tara Patel‘s facelessness __ there is no available picture or interview or discussion of the poet as a person __ compounds the impression left by Single Woman, 223 of the countless faceless ‗independent‘ single women who live on the margins of mainstream life in India.

Of Tara Patel‘s generation, but representing a very different voice is the poetry of Meena Alexander. Unlike Patel, whose book appeared in 1992,

Alexander‘s first book came out in 1980. As mentioned in the previous chapter,

Meena Alexander is the first diasporic Indian woman poet. And her emigration to the

U.S. has only been the culmination of a series of migrations that began at first within

India, then to Africa (the Sudan), followed by the U.K. This itinerant life has given her poetry and her prose writings their probing concern with location and identity, with movements in history, and especially in her poetry, with the process of self- making or unmaking in migratory conditions. In terms of the present thesis, it needs to be noted that like Gauri Deshpande, Meena Alexander is not among the Nine Indian

Women Poets, in Eunice de Souza‘s anthology. Alexander‘s first three volumes __ The

Bird‟s Bright Ring, a long poem, from Writers Workshop (1976) , Root My Name from United Writers (1977) and Without Place also from Writers Workshop (1977) __ had come out from Calcutta. As an Indian English poet and fiction writer Meena

Alexander is published in journals such as Critical Quarterly, The Poetry Review, and

Chandrabhaga. Alexander‘s poetic voice was not a fit in Nine Indian Women Poets in

1997 which represented a kind of poetry that de Souza felt belonged in a line that began with Kamala Das. Alexander shares Das‘s Malabar geography but within a different community, Like the Goan poets she too belongs by birth, to the Christian community, but again unlike them to a Syrian Christian community with a very different trajectory in India. However Alexander‘s poetry was not concerned with these aspects of identity, rather with a larger canvas of history and geography. 224

K. Ayyappa Paniker‘s 1991 anthology, Modern Indian Poetry in English, published by Sahitya Akademi has twenty poets, three of whom are women __ Gauri Deshpande,

Kamala Das and Meena Alexander. Paniker writes in the Introduction that ‗to be

Indian‘ the Indian poet,

has to be rooted somewhere in India – geographically, historically, socially or psychologically‘, and that ‗tradition‘ is ‗a bond between the past and the present. It should not be a bondage. (15) and that

Meena Alexander, in spite of her having lived outside Kerala for a long time, often dwells on her Kerala experience in her poetry. Some of her best poems are evocations or dramatizations of those experiences. (18-9)

The two poems by Alexander in Paniker‘s anthology celebrate two historical figures both of whom travelled across geographies and histories in different ways, but whose journeys resonate with Meena Alexander‘s own engagement with the theme of migration. The first poem ‗Sidi Syed‘s Architecture‘ appeared in Alexander‘s 1988 volume The House with a Thousand Doors, and refers to the famous Sidi Syed

29 Mosque in the Indian city of Ahmadabad in Gujarat. Meena Alexander writes:

I sometimes wonder what he was like, Sidi Syed, a small man come all the way from Abyssinia, his skin the color of earth before waters broke loose from the Sabermati river. It was Ahmed‘s city then, in the year 1500. (Paniker 20)

The poet imagines him as,

Loitering by the river he watched infants with blackened eyes swinging in their cradles, mothers with chapped hands, laundering. He saw skins of cattle and deer laid out to dry on the sharp rocks,

225

heard voices in them calling him, crying out as if home were nothing but this terrible hunger loosed between twin earths, one underfoot by the river bed, the other borne in the heart‘s hole. (Paniker 20)

Sidi Syed, later a man of substance ‗picked the hands of a master cutter‘ and

From crags of marble he watched it grow, on driest land, no tract of water near, the threshold lightly raised to slipping lines, a corset to the hips of finest stone arched to a tympanum so rare it fled from nature. (Paniker 21)

The poet wonders at the delicate lattice work of the building:

Was it for him this starry palm with vine on vine still tumbling, a tumult of delight struck from a stonecutter‘s hands – fit elaboration of a man unhoused, yet architect of himself, his genius still smouldering? ( 20-1)

Alexander‘s other poem in Paniker‘s anthology is titled ‗To Li Ch‘ing-chao‘.30 Just as the mosque in Ahmadabad sends the poet into a reverie configuring the life of its architect, the 16th century Sidi Syed, a book of poems by a Chinese poet makes Meena

Alexander write:

Into her eyes wild geese are vanishing. I rub the glass I stare at this northern snow

I read the poems of Li Ch‘ing-chao She lived seven centuries ago. 31 (22)

226

Alexander traces Li Ch‘ing-chao‘s early poetic career of luxurious contemplative isolation,

Once you made poems to the tune of a silk washing brook syllables of a washer woman weeping or in your room teasing black hair pondered love‘s decrepitude. Wine clung to your lips, The washer woman when she wept too loud disturbed you, so you shut the glass. (Paniker 22)

And then Alexander moves to the next stage of Li Ch‘ing –chao‘s life,

Years later you sang that terrible Weary Song to a Slow Sad Tune ―Cold cold; clear, clear‖ not seeing the wild geese tremble in the glass and vanish. (Paniker 22)

Alexander quotes the title and a line from Li Ch‘ing‘s actual poem here.32 She then imagines the Chinese poet‘s study of ancient art,

Bent head, hair poured to your mouth almost ablaze by candlelight

you touch a blossom stitched in bronze a wild wing etched, recording natural ruin.

And where would Shang and Chou be without you, anxious centuries alive in your script The Study of Bronze and Stone Inscriptions? (23)

The Study of Bronze and Stone Inscriptions is the title of the Chinese poet‘s valuable research on the ancient art of the Shang and Chou dynasties. The next stanza moves to

Li Ch‘ing –chao‘s later poetry, again quoting entire lines from the Chinese poet in double inverted commas:

You stumble to a window utterly spent ―Wild geese fly overhead‖ 227

you scratch on the frozen pane ―They wrench my heart‖. (23)

Li Ch‘ing-chao had to flee the Tartar invasion of Manchuria, and reach Nanking after a harsh journey. In the last section of the poem, Meena Alexander calls out to the poet centuries in the past:

Li Ch‘ing-chao, only the heart survives.

Forced now in middle life into the cold, commit yourself to the long trek south, the iron anchorage of Nanking.

Do not forget the Tartars you flee they are desperate men slaughtering even geese.

In time‘s desolation be as precise as you have been before. The ache of a foot bound in sackcloth sinking in ice.

Your visionary eyes toxic with cold. (23-24).

Both poems are framed against a backdrop of Asian history. Both poems represent migrancy __ the Chinese poet travelling back in time through her scholarship of ancient art, and having to travel across harsh terrain fleeing a pursuing horde, Sidi

Syed coming to Gujarat on the Indian subcontinent from Abyssinia ( modern day norther Ethiopia) ___ both poems present images of the body __ ‗ache of a foot/ bound in sackcloth/ sinking in ice‘, ‗the heart‘s hole‘, ( ‗To Li Ch‘ing-chao‘) ‗a corset to the hips of finest stone/arched to a tympanum so rare‘ and ‗madness of stretched skin‘(‗Sidi Syed‘s Architecture‘). Both poems are about the creators of art and poetry.

These poems represent the essence of Alexander‘s concerns in poetry. It is understandable why Paniker includes them in his 1991 anthology with poets such as 228

Arun Kolatkar and Jayanta Mahapatra who too write about the present day relevance of the historicity of places, or Adil Jussawala who writes of exile, or even Kamala

Das whose poems in this anthology by Paniker speak of place and time. In ‗Stone

Age‘ by Das the speaker says,

Fond husband, ancient settler in the mind, Old fat spider, weaving webs of bewilderment, Be kind. You turn me into a bird of stone, a granite Dove… . . . on daydreams, strong men cast their shadows, they sink Like white suns in the swell of my Dravidian blood, Secretly flow the drains beneath sacred cities. (50)

Or in poems such as ‗Of Calcutta‘ (46) , and ‗The Wild Bougainvillea‘ (53) , where

Das lists specific places, streets and roads of the city of Calcutta. Yet it is also easy to see why Eunice de Souza does not include Meena Alexander‘s poetry in Nine Indian

Women Poets. The vast canvas of time and space of most of Alexander‘s poetry does not really belong with the poetry of specific times and places in the poems of this anthology. But in her larger and encyclopaedic anthology, These My Words: The

Penguin Book of Indian Poetry, de Souza includes a poem by Meena Alexander,

‗Looking Through Well Water‘, where the poet says,

I hear grandmother singing, she is singing in well water I see her face as the waves stir over cloudy white pebbles. … She didn't give birth to me but when I look into the well it's her face I see, slight freckled bones bent into water

I'll tell you what divides us: a ridge of cloud, two oceans, a winter in my fireless room high above Van Cortlandt Park also death, the darkest water crashing through pebbles, fern fronds, bits of speckled shell‘. (372-73) 229

In a 1996 essay, ‗Accidental Markings‘, in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 26, No. 4,

Alexander says,

to travel in the mind, through places one has known, is also to scrape back history, reveal the knots, the accidental markings of sense and circumstance that make up our lives, to disclose ordinary lives as they cut against the grand narratives of history, the rubric of desire gritty against the supposed truths we have learned. Poetry becomes part of this difficult labor, weaving a fabric that can bear the gnarled, tangled threads of our lives. Then, too, to cross a border can be to die a little. And the shock of a new life comes in, tearing up the old skin, old habits of awareness. (131)

Tree, stone, earth, water are important elemental metaphors that constantly touch and define her sense of the body. Her early volume Stone Roots (1980) has a poem titled

‗Childhood‘ where she begins by saying,

Quite early as a child I understood flesh was not stone.

Stone sank into flooded paddy beds children were rescued.

Unlike children, stone does not, need

to hold its breath while passing whitewashed tombs.

There row on row children are laid perfectly cold, like stone.

While stone warm as well rinsed flesh is lit with dimpling milkweed wreathed in green rhapsodies of fern. (Alexander ‗Childhood‘ )

The, the original assertion that children are not stone and borne out by the living children‘s activities, activities that stones are incapable of, is collapsed by the comparison of dead children buried ‗like stone‘ with actual stones. This gives the lie to what she first understood as a child, ‗That flesh was not stone‘. Alexander whose 230 academic explorations in Romanticism are consistently reflected in her poetry, evokes in these lines, poems such as Wordsworth‘s, ‗A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal‘ where the frolicking child loses ‗motion‘ in death, and becomes one with ‗rocks and stone and trees‘. For Meena Alexander, thirty three years after the Stone Roots volume, Birthplace with Buried Stones (2013) continues that early association of flesh and stone. In an interview with Ruth Maxey 2005 Alexander says that

Wordsworth was her ‗presiding spirit‘,

‗his words cut straight to the heart of my childhood-the trauma, the blessing, the interior life the child bears within… Yet I felt that in order to read his work, I had to cross a line of blood‘. (Alexander and Maxey 189)

Speaking of the genesis of Birthplace with Buried Stones, in an essay, ‗What Use Is

Poetry?‘ in World Literature Today. September/ October 2013 Alexander quotes

Shelley:

Embedded at the heart of Percy Shelley‘s ―A Defence of Poetry‖ (1821) are lines in which he evokes the unbidden power of the poem: ―It creates for us a being within our being. It makes us inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.‖

She explains the liberating power of poetry in these terms:

What is this counter world, this being within our being, this zone of desire that poetry evokes? Surely there is a great and buried truth here, something to do with our ecstatic being, the piercings of sense that mere rationality cannot afford, a way of making sense, lacking which we would all be hostages in our own skins. (Alexander ‗What Use Is Poetry?‘ Web )

For Alexander, poetry is ‗release from the skin‘ that makes us, to use Shelley‘s words, ‗inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos‘. ‗What Use is

Poetry‘ took shape from a question thrown to her at a reading ‗in Colorado in a hall with huge windows that gave out onto the Rockies‘ by a young woman. ‗She might 231 have been Plato‘s daughter asking me‘, Alexander wrote later; Plato who would have the poets banned from his Republic. Alexander made a poem out of that question, and her answer to it, titled ‗Question Time‘ and included in Birthplace with Buried

Stones:

Her question, a woman in a sweatshirt,

Hand raised in a crowded room — What use is poetry?

Above us, lights flickered, Something wrong with the wiring.

I turned and saw the moon whirl in water, The Rockies struck with a mauve light,

Sea creatures cut into sky foliage. In the shadow of a shrub once you and I

Brushed lips and thighs, Dreamt of a past that frees its prisoners.

Standing apart I looked at her and said — We have poetry

So we do not die of history. (89)

Alexander‘s poetry is about refusing the prison of the skin, and freeing oneself of the past. This consciousness comes from her itinerant childhood, her inter-racial marriage, her adoption of U.S. citizenship, and, as she has herself narrated, from the worldview imparted by her meteorologist father, where, wind and water, create a map that is in constant flux. The earth is seen to be neither divided by political boundaries, nor historical dates, rather by geological elements, rocks and stones and trees. Humans inhabit this earth, creating art, poetry, homes, lives, and then merge with the elements. Books, monuments, and art are accorded their respectful place, but Alexander goes behind these and finds living flesh, even though the flesh and the senses perish with each generation Alexander‘s poetry shores them up as monuments 232 against the ravages of time. Flesh and stone, the senses and the concrete structures, are thus in constant dialogue in her poetry. The first poem in Birthplace with Buried

Stone, ‗Morning Ritual‘ shows the poet sitting in the shade of a pipal tree (in Shimla) with a book of poems by the 17th century Japanese poet Matshuo Basho The Narrow

Road to the Deep North. Written in five unrhymed couplets, evoking the style of haiku poetry, the poem brings together the immediately sensory, with the imagined landscape of Basho‘s journey. In an endnote to the poem Alexander writes how

“Morning Ritual” and other poems (Shimla cycle) was composed during a month in the summer of 2010 when she stayed at the Viceregal Lodge in Shimla, her suite of rooms looking out to the Himalayas, how she would sit under a pipal tree, with a copy of Basho __ ‗I felt his lines might help me in my journey‘ ___ and how,

Other places are also evoked in this cycle of poems: the Lodi gardens in Delhi, where I used to live; Bryant Park, a place I love in New York City; Sendai in Japan, which I could only imagine. (123)

The first line of the poem ‗Morning Ritual‘ gives the poet‘s present context, ‗I sit in a patch of shade cast by a pipal tree‘, followed by the imaginative context, ‗Each morning I read a few lines from The Narrow Road to the Deep North‟. Quoting the title of the book in her hand, just as she had quoted the title of the book The Study of

Bronze and Stone Inscriptions by Li Ch‘ing-chao in another poem, the poet, an academic, brings into the poem, the context of Basho‘s book. In the next couplet, she asks, ‗Where did Basho go? /He entered a cloud and came out on the other side‘.

Basho writes in Narrow Road , that, at a point in the journey high up in the hills, they were ‗wondering if we were passing through the great cloud barrier into the very pathways of the sun and moon‘.33 The next lines in Alexander‘s poem ‗Morning

Ritual‘ list geological debris, that could be taken from Basho‘s narrative, or from the immediate setting at Shimla, 233

Everything is broken and numinous. Tiled roofs, outcrops of stone, flesh torn from mollusks. Far away, a flottila of boats. A child sucking stones, There is a forked path to this moment. (7)

Through the metaphor of the mountain terrain, this also indicates a choice of path to the present, the choice of seeing the present moment under the pipal tree in association with the narrative of a 17th century Japanese poet‘s journey. The forked path is the path of palimpsest. In the midst of the book‘s world, which tinges her present world, amidst the debris __ ‗outcrops of stone, flesh torn from mollusks‘ __ and other random vignettes __ ‗Far away, a flotilla of boats. A child sucking stones‘

__ with their ambivalent existence in book or present, there is the tree, the pipal tree, a living palpable thing. ‗Trees have no elsewhere. /Leaves very green‘, she concludes. The tree represents a tangible materiality that allows no room for ambivalence. It also implies that unlike trees, humans always have an elsewhere…a place to go to, multiple abodes. The next poem ‗Lychees‘ in Birthplace with Buried

Stones, also balances, literally balances, book and fruit as she writes:

Terrace deep as the sky. Stone bench where I sit and read,

I wandered by myself Into the heart of the mountains of Yoshino.

In one hand a book, in the other, a bag made of newsprint— No weather-beaten bones here

Just lychees bought in the market, Thirty rupees per kilogram.

Stalks mottled red tied up with string, Flesh the color of pigeon wings— (8)

Alexander‘s poems always set up a dialectic between an old text and the present day context of its reading. In the collection of 2013, Landscape With Buried 234

Stones, ‗Reading Imruʾ al-Qays on the Subway‘ shows a woman poet of Indian origin reading Imruʾ al-Qays, a 5th century Arab poet34 in an American subway.

Alexander‘s poem has as epigraph a line from Emerson __ ‗Every spirit builds itself a house‘. Imru‘s Mu‟allaqa35 to which Alexander refers in the eighteenth line of her poem is about the grief over a past love. Imru‘s poem begins with a cry to his travelling companions to halt, as they arrive at the place where he knew her once long ago. The place is now windswept and has gazelle droppings. The poem describes in somewhat erotic detail his meetings with her. Meena Alexander reading the poem in an American subway mingles images from Imru‘s desert landscape with images from the subway. If Imru‘s poem is about a halt in a journey, Alexander‘s poem is about transit. Her poem begins with a description of torn clothes bundled up:

Clothing heaped on the uneven stones of the sidewalk A ripped shirt, one sleeve blue another green,

One cut up and stuffed within the other __ How else to make a garment latch over itself like this?

Useful to someone struggling to stay warm, Discarded later at the mouth of the subway

(Before winter breaks, all things are possible). (104)

The patched up shirt, ‗ One cut up and stuffed within the other‘ becomes a metaphor for her own poetic craft that constantly superimposes, texts, contexts, places and times to create moments of linkage. In her doctoral thesis, ―Interconnections and

Tensions Between Postcolonialism and Feminism in South Asian Women Poets: the

Case of Meena Alexander, Suniti Namjoshi and Imtiaz Dharker‖ Stefania Basset writes, in a section titled ‗Palimpsests of Place‘, in ‗Chapter 2: Meena Alexander‘, that, 235

In Meena Alexander's own experience, poems become real places, and have the function of anchors, somehow stitching the author's existence, so that her life can finally make sense to her. In an interview Alexander explains it as follows: ―I have to fabricate place so that these images can exist, not as mere bits and pieces of temporality, echoing in my inwardness, but as portions of a shining symbolic space, their fluttering parts, redisposed in a poem‖ (Alexander in Gioseffi 2006, 48). For Meena Alexander, the concept of location in poetry and its construction in our consciousness is thus not only connected to space, but also to temporality. ―Location is a temporal index‖, she affirms in an interview (Alexander in Poddar and Alexander 2001, n. pag.[page 15]). Having studied Husserl's Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness for her doctoral thesis on Romanticism, she came to the conclusion that ―memory is spatial, and . . . location is temporal‖ (ibidem)77. (Basset. 88) 36

Women‘s lives and unmistakable women‘s voices form the poems and poets in Nine

Indian Women Poets and other anthologies of women‘s poetry such as Arlene Zide‘s.

Meena Alexander‘s poetry is not about an overtly gendered vision. The two poems from Paniker‘s anthology discussed above are about two historical personages, a male traveller/soldier/ architect artist, and a woman poet and scholar who too had to traverse time (as an art historian) and place (as a hunted person fleeing to safety).

Palimpsest is there in women‘s poetry in the inscription of the Radha-Krishna relationship on their own lives in poems such as Das‘s ‗Ghanashyam‘, Sarojini

Naidu‘s poetry that superimposes Indian mythology on her own condition or the condition of her land. To layer a text (poetry/ prose/ art) from another culture upon local and personal life is there in Eunice-de Souza‘s poem, ‗Women in Dutch

Painting‘. For Meena Alexander wanderer, traveller, poet, palimpsest works in ways that incorporate her life an academic. There are extensive notes to explain the context of her poems; none less than thirteen poems in Birthplace with Buried Stones have endnotes. The references to texts in her poetry makes readers look up the texts.

Though the poetry itself is founded on the sensory, the instinctive, on memory, and influenced by Romanticism, the structure is always textually, geographically and 236 historically erudite; this aspect of her writing is found in diaspora poet, Sujata Bhatt as well, where the poetry is sometimes premised on an academic perception ___ for instance, in poems such as ‗Something for Plato‘. In fact even though Meena

Alexander‘s poetry is not overtly gendered, it does spring from female experience, as she says in an interview,

Somehow I feel that if we are concerned with a new life, by which I mean the hidden and continually violated potentialities of this limited human existence, we must seek out the canker, in the terrible self-division suffered by woman. Women and slaves. The self-division of the body. (Alexander and Tharu 11)

The woman‘s body is essential to Alexander‘s poetry, and finds its metaphor in the image of the tree:

…. as a woman I feel that the only materials I am allowed to use are the elements of my own body; blood, which is so close to any woman; bones, though I do not speak of them and use stone instead, and flesh, which I locate, I think, in trees. I mean they are so rooted… (11)

‗Morning Ritual‘ begins with the poet sitting under the pipal tree near the Himalayas, with Basho‘s poems in her hands. The reverie on Basho‘s journey through cloud on high hilly terrain is concluded with, ‗Trees have no elsewhere. / Leaves very green‘.

Alexander explains this in the interview with Tharu,

…. if we use the very materiality of the body, its elements, to build with, then

slowly, bit by bit, the self-division is overcome. The pain of the root flows

back into the bark, the branch, the twig and the tree flowers. I suppose this is

what I believe. But under soil the roots divide. And in the air, branches divide.

But the cycle of the tree is no tautology. Perhaps in the figure one sees the

anguish of perennial division (11)

The tree as a metaphor for her own self, the migrant, the female and the poet, living in many houses, is inscribed in the title poem of her first book of poems, I Root my

Name. ( 1977) where she writes: 237

Between the night trees racked with leaves and ancient timber groaning into earth I root my name. (14-18)

Female experience informs Meena Alexander‘s poetry in the very idea of otherness.

The publisher‘s note on Birthplace with Buried Stones says:

With their intense lyricism, Meena Alexander‘s poems convey the fragmented experience of the traveller, for whom home is both everywhere and nowhere. The landscapes she evokes, whether walking a city street or reading Bashō in the Himalayas, hold echoes of otherness. Place becomes a palimpsest, composed of layer upon layer of memory, dream, and desire.

Alexander, removed from her ancestral home in Tiruvella , at the age of five, to live in Khartoum where her father had taken a new job, life has been about building homes in new places as much as it has been removal from old homes.

‗Poem by the Well Side,‖ ―Her Garden,‖ ―House of a Thousand Doors,‖ ―Looking through Well Water,‖ and ―Salt Spray‖ and the prose fiction ___ ―Burnt Hair‖ and

―Grandmother‘s Letters‖ are all about this ancestral location, notes Krishnakumari in her doctoral dissertation ‗Configuration of space in the poetry of Meena Alexander and Anna Sujatha Mathai‘, two Indian English diaspora women poets hailing from

Tiruvella. (Krishnakumari 113-4) On being asked about her grandmother‘s house in

Tiruvella in Kerala, the southernmost tip of India, a house which she would inherit,

Alexander spoke of in an interview with Susie Tharu, how:

….. if my life is to be real I must learn to live in her house. … Suffer the imprisonment she suffered. Walls, a husband who was given to her and a God so distant that His rage was the rage of her own father … And the knowledge that came, was mute. I must release that knowledge. I feel it is crucial to the survival of the body. …Is my poetry blasphemy? It must be. For it is sinful for women to speak. I was brought up with that notion, branded into me. My strict Syrian Christian upbringing. When I was very young this scared me so much that the only place I felt at ease writing poetry, in my father's house, was in the toilet. And the vision was rhapsodic, scarcely excremental. ... I guess that comes later! (Alexander and Tharu 12)

238

The ‗echoes of otherness‘ in Alexander‘s poetry indicates postcoloniality, at several levels ___ for one, the imprisonment and the dislocation of the female body is compared to the slave‘s condition, and at another level, the embrace of other literatures, other languages, even though her own writing medium is English.

Speaking of the woman and the slave‘s experience in the same interview, she says,

…we must seek out the canker, in the terrible self-division suffered by woman. Women and slaves. The self-division of the body‘. (11) …the whole point of being a slave; you are exiled, in perpetuity, from the father's house. In "Salt Spray" the slaves are where they belong, in the salt sea, turning to stone… (12)

Alexander also speaks of the burden of English language in this interview with Tharu, in 1978 at Hyderabad, before she left for the United States:

And then there is the problem of writing, speaking poetically, in India, with English….overcome? I think that horrible, involved poem of Without Place is my maiden attempt to pose the problem. It is an attempt to overcome the rhetoric of false problems which are posed. Critics, academic critics, can be terrible creatures. They try so hard to maintain the status quo. Their bread depends on it. So they try and take the poet over by posing false questions. Here the false question is: How can you write authentic poetry in India with English? (13-4)

Alexander had been teaching at Hyderabad University around this time, teaching

English Literature, like Eunice de Souza, and Gauri Deshpande. Yet one can hear in her voice the same question raised by Kamala Das almost two decades ago in ‗An

Introduction‘:

Don't write in English, they said, English is Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins, Every one of you? Why not let me speak in Any language I like? The language I speak, Becomes mine…

The other aspect of language is linked to being a woman in India, woman who is traditionally to remain silent, then in the U.S., being an immigrant, and a ‗person of 239 colour‘. But Meena Alexander, before her emigration to the U.S. had been a migrant even within India, as she states in the essay, ‗Piecemeal Shelters‘ in The Shock of

Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (I996)

I was born a few years after Indian independence and learned English both in India and in North Africa. The English I learned in India was always braided in with other languages: Hindi, for I was born in Allahabad and spent my earliest years there; Malayalam, the language of my parents; Tamil which was spoken by friends; Marathi, for I spent a year in Pune. In contrast the English I learnt from a Scottish tutor in Khartoum, and perfected in the Diocesan School for British children was strict and given the sternness of colonial pedagogy, cut away from the Arabic that flowed all around, from French, and from my mother- tongue Malayalam, even from the sort of English I spoke with my parents and friends. (3-4)

The next thing that she says about English resonates with Kamala Das‘s manifesto of language in ‗An Introduction‘:

it was as if a white skin had covered over that language of accomplishment, and I had to pierce through it, tear it open in order to make it supple, fluid enough to accommodate the murmurings of my own heart. (4)

For Kamala Das the tearing open of the language had been a violent act of defiance too __ ‗The language I speak, / Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses/All mine, mine alone‘.

For Meena Alexander there was also the additional burden, what she calls, ‗the canonical burden‘, ‗the haunting elegiac mask of the Wordsworthian paradigm‘. In

‗Piecemeal Shelters‘, in The Shock of Arrival, she describes this realization as a

‗shock‘, ‗a crisis in my writing life‘

an elixir I possessed and might drink to the full or spit out as I chose ___ to realize that the machine of the colonial, technically post-colonial education I had received and indeed had fostered, was cutting my words off from the wellsprings of desire. Suddenly I felt that even memory would be impossible if I did not turn my attention to the violence very close at hand, attendant, in fact, upon the procedures of my own writing.( 4) 240

In the second section of her title poem ‗Illiterate Hearts‘, in Illiterate Heart

(2002) Meena Alexander records how her mother took great care of her English primers with their pictures of white children Tom and Bess, and how she could not relate to their clothes, their lives as shown in the book, and her struggles with pronunciation:

How did I come to this script? Amma taught me from the Reading Made Easy books , Steps 1 & 2 pointed out Tom and Bess little English children sweet vowels of flesh they mouthed to perfection: aa ee ii oo uu a(apple) b(bat) c(cat) d(dat) Dat? I could not get, so keen the rhymes made me, sense overthrown. Those children wore starched knickerbockers or sailor suits and caps , waved Union Jacks. (64)

The older poet looks back on the irony of the books on the shelf in her childhood home,

The books sat between Gandhi‘s Experiments with Truth and a minute crown of thorns a visiting bishop had brought.(64)

The visiting bishop in her Malabar home, sketches a history and geography that links rural Malabar with old Jerusalem. And Meena Alexander‘s own polyglot heritage with those of the natives of Jerusalem.

He told us that the people of Jerusalem spoke many tongues including Arabic, Persian Syriac as in our liturgy, Aramaic too.

Donkeys dragged weights through tiny streets. Like our buffaloes, he laughed.

She narrates how she had to sing and recite her accomplishments before the visitor:

I had to perform my Jana Gana Mana for him and Wordsworth‘s daffodil poem —

the latter I turned into a rural terror 241

my version of the chartered streets.( 63-68)

What Alexander here delineates, about the learning of English, or the incongruity of the ‗Daffodils‘ poem in the Malabar setting has been discussed by Meenakshi

Mukherjee and other postcolonial authors. ‗Metaphors of Belonging in Andrea Levy‘s

Small Island‘ by Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso in Metaphors and Diaspora in

Contemporary Writing edited by Jonathan P A Sell, notes this discourse across the

English speaking colonies in Asia , Africa, and the Caribbean:

In post-colonial criticism the teaching of this lyric has come to embody the constrictions of the imperial system of education in the colonies, a system which created a problematic sense of identity by producing ‗mimic‘ men and women (see Bhaba 1994:85-92)… Meenakshi Mukherjee, for instance, remembers her adolescent desire to become ‗daffodilized‘ ( Mukherjee1993:112 ) that is, to be educated in the English system to the point where she could possess ‗the casual elegance and fluency in spoken English‘ of the girls ‗who knew English better than any Indian language‘. (Mukherjee1993: 112 ) (Muñoz-Valdivieso Web)

In ‗Piecemeal Shelters‘ in The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial

Experience (1996) Meena Alexander says that the troublesome colonial legacy of the

English language and of English Literature,

fused with the need to voice the truths of female body, precisely that which had been torn away, cast out from the linguistic awareness I had refined. (4)

Alexander says that in her search for ‗ways to go‘ she read,

Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, the fierce tumultuous works of Lalithambika Antarjanam, who, writing in Malayalam from a Namboodiri household, was able to tear apart the skin of decorum…(5)

Alexander says of Naidu that she was, despite her work with Gandhi,

never able to cut free of the poetic ideology, the tight stanzas of pale figurative constraint she had picked up from Arthur Symons and Gosse in her studies in England. (5) This was originally expressed in a lecture in 1991, later published in the article

―Piecemeal Shelter: Writing, Ethnicity, Violence" in Public Culture, 5 (3), in 1993. 242

That Alexander is not fair to Naidu here is established in the chapter on Naidu in the present thesis where it has been demonstrated how Naidu used the colonially inherited poetic form to craft her own resistance to colonialism through prioritising a lyrical poetic self as well as successfully negotiate a political tightrope to articulate her protest over colonial policies. Alexander had written an essay ‗Sarojini Naidu:

Romanticism and Resistance‘ for EPW Special Number, Review of Women‟s Studies,

Vol.20, No.43 (1985). The 1996 version of the essay titled ‗In Search of Sarojini

Naidu‘, cites, this time, not ‗tight stanzas of pale figurative constraint‘, new readings of Naidu‘s poems from the Golden Threshold, as well as later poems such as the invocation to Kali, and links it to her agenda of arming against the colonizer. Meena

Alexander now cites Naidu‘s speeches that spoke of compulsory military training for her compatriots, even though it conflicted with the Gandhian ideal of ahimsa.

Alexander concludes ‗In Search of Sarojini Naidu‘ in The Shock of Arrival with:

Now the passage of her resistance seems clear. The confrontation with the sometimes bruising bonds of her own culture empowered her, permitting her to attack the public boundaries laid down by a colonial power. And it is possible to see that her private, often agonizing conflicts, as recorded in poetry, were crucial to the integrity of her living voice. (181-2)

That Alexander puts both versions of her reading of Sarojini Naidu into her collection,

The Shock of Arrival demonstrates not only her academic approach to the development of literary interpretation but also the collector‘s desire to shore things up. For Meena Alexander, scripts are not for discarding but retrieving and building with, building upon.

Another thing about Alexander‘s reading of Indian women poets is her overlooking of Kamala Das and an entire generation of modern Indian women poets in ‗Piecemeal Shelters‘. However in 2009, in ‗The language I speak becomes mine:

In Memory of Kamala Suraiya‘ she writes that Kamala Das was her friend, had 243 stayed with her in New York, and she too had visited Das and her mother in Kochi,

India, and how,

Kamala‘s work is part of a larger movement of South Asian women poets in the second half of the 20th century who fuse the claims of poetry and the claims of desire, making poems where the injustice of the world is illuminated, where the imagination can work. We need to read her poems by the side of the poems of Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, Adrienne Rich. We need to read her poems by the side of her natural forebears, the great women poets of the Bhakti movement: Akkamahadevi, Mirabai and others for whom the freedom of the poet is the freedom to sing of love, love that can only come to us in these fragile passionate bodies we are born to. (The Shock of Arrival 17)

Alexander next mentions other (postcolonial) poets from across the world __ Sudan,

Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya. She makes special mention of the American

African woman poet Toni Morrison, and the American-Chicana, lesbian, feminist writer and activist Gloria Anzaldua. Meena Alexander‘s eclectic choice of authors in her search for a way out of her own location as American-Asian woman poet __

‗walking down a crowded sidewalk, descending the subway, there is always one‘s own body, which is marked as Other in this country. Ethnicity can draw violence … all this is part of the postcolonial terrain, part of the sorrow of our senses‘ she writes in ‗Piecemeal Shelters‘. It also makes her aware that although she had not experienced violence at first hand, she had been living near violence all her life, be it her parent‘s memories of the Partition, the colonial structures in Indian cities, the political unrest in Khartoum during her childhood, and the immigrants around her in daily America who have fled from violence in their homelands and live with the prejudice with its implication of social violence in their adopted country of America. Alexander refers to Theresa Cha‘s Dictée which has an image of the folded handkerchief where the previous folds still show, and elsewhere in the book, how stains seep through. (5)

But Malayalam, the mother tongue was equally tortuous as, in Allahabad where she was born and lived till she was five, Hindi was spoken all around her, and in 244

Khartoum where she lived till college, it was Arabic. She writes in section IV of

‗Illiterate Heart‘,

At noon I burrowed through Malayalam sounds, slashes of sense, a floating trail.

Nights I raced into the garden.

Smoke on my tongue, wet earth from twisted roots of banyan and fiscus Indica.

What burnt in the mirror of the great house became a fierce condiment. A metier almost:

aa i ii u uu au um aha ka kh ga gha nga cha chha ja ja nja

njana (my sole self), njaman (knowledge) nunni (gratitude) ammechi, appechan, veliappechan (grandfather).

Uproar of sense, harsh tutelage: aana (elephant) amma (tortoise) ambjuan (lotus).

A child mouthing words to flee family.

I will never enter that house I swore, I‘ll never be locked in a cage of script.

And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly, I committed that to memory, later added : ce lieu me plaît dominé de flambeaux. (Illiterate Heart 66-7)

The multiple scripts and spoken languages that was part of her life enables her to move freely between languages. Meena Alexander provides an endnote to these lines: 245

[―And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly‖ is from T.S. Eliot‘s Four Quartets; ―ce lieu me plait/ dominé de flambeaux‖ is from Paul Valery‘s ‗Cimetiere Marin‟. As part of my early studies, I had to learn a portion of each poem by heart]

__ thereby suggesting the inevitability of scripts even as she says she will not be locked into a cage of scripts. The range of scripts and sounds in this section, English,

Malayalam and French, the admission in the endnote, conveys the pressure of languages but they also became part of herself as the words took living shape in her mind:

Letters grew fins and tails Swords sprang from the tips of consonants, vowels grew ribbed and sharp Pages bound into leather turned the colour of ink. (65)

The ruptures created by an early and compelled entry into multiple languages had a rupturing effect,

My body flew apart : wrist, throat, elbow, thigh, knee where a mole rose, bony scapula, blunt cut hair,

then utter stillness as a white sheet dropped on nostrils and neck.

Black milk of childhood drunk and drunk again!

I longed to be like Tom and Bess dead flat on paper. (66)

Alexander‘s struggles with languages thrust early upon her, are recalled as,

In dreams I was a child babbling at the gate splitting into two, three to make herself safe. (67)

And then there are a series of images to express her condition __

In dreams I was a child babbling 246

at the gate splitting into two, three to make herself safe.

Grown women combing black hair in moonlight by the railroad track, stuck forever at the accidental edge.

O the body in parts, bruised buttress of heaven! she cries,

a child in a village church clambering into embroidered vestements to sing at midnight a high sweet tune.

Or older now musing in sunlight combing a few white strands of hair. ( 67-8)

The image of the child in vestments, singing at midnight suggests coercion. The image of women combing their hair by railway tracks is a familiar enough sight across the Indian countryside and the cities and towns . In Alexander‘s memory from childhood it retains an ambivalent impression, of calm, yet ‗stuck forever at the accidental edge‘. In her mature years this image merges with an image of own self,

Or older now musing in sunlight combing a few white strands of hair. To be able to fail. To set oneself up so that failure is also possible. (68)

The anxiety of childhood now seems to give way to a sense of clarity, a way out of the mist. For Alexander this way out is to forge her own way, to reconfigure, combine and create her own language. It is a variation of Kamala Das‘s ‗The language I speak,/Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses‘.

Alexander says in ‗ Illiterate Heart‘ that,

….failure is also possible.

Yes, 247

that too however it is grasped.

The movement towards self definition. A woman walking the streets, a woman combing her hair.

Can this make music in your head? Can you whistle hot tunes to educate the barbarians?

These lines took decades to etch free, the heart‘s illiterate, the map is torn.

Someone I learn to recognise, cries out at Kurtz, thrusts skulls aside, lets the floodwaters pour. (68)

After a life time of struggle she is at last able to declare her linguistic and cultural freedom, to validate her hybridity as it were. This is her testimony of the mindboggling education and erudition, that yet leaves the heart unschooled. Maps cannot guide. The poem ends with her alignment with the black woman on the shore,

Someone I learn to recognise, cries out at Kurtz, thrusts skulls aside, lets the floodwaters pour.

There is a sense of redemption as she sights someone coming, a saviour likely, as the line ‗lets the floodwaters pour‘ resonates with lines from the Bible: ‗For I will pour out water on the thirsty land And streams on the dry ground; I will pour out My Spirit on your offspring And My blessing on your descendants….‘ [ Isaiah 44:3] This poem by Alexander with its delineation of the torment of languages imposed in childhood may be compared to the poetry of Sujata Bhatt where language is suppressed in adult life.

Meena Alexander‘s title poem in Illiterate Heart uses Conrad‘s Heart of

Darkness as a metaphor for her multiple subjectivities, as privileged traveller, as 248 wandering soul, as Kurtz and Marlowe, but also as ‗a black woman just visible at the shore‘, that is, the woman in Conrad‘s novel who disappears as the boat bearing

Marlowe moves away from the heart of darkness in Africa and returns towards that other darkness of the Thames. In Part I of the poem she writes:

I was Marlowe and Kurtz and still more a black woman just visible at the shore. I thought it‘s all happened, all happened before.

So it was I began, unsure of the words I was to use still waiting for a ghost to stop me crying out: You think you write poetry! Hey you –

as he sidestepped me dressed neatly in his kurta and dhoti, a mahakavi from the temples of right thought.

Or one in white flannels unerringly English, lured from Dove Cottage, transfixed by carousels of blood, Danton‘s daring, stumbling over stones never noticing his outstretched hand passed through me. (63-4)

These lines underline her conflicting positions as English language Indian poet, in

India and in the West.

However the international poet wrestling with issues of language, and the dark woman on the shore have another face, as it were in the figure of Alexander‘s grand aunt, Chinna. Alexander‘s poem ‗Aunt Chinna‘, first published in Night-Scene, the Garden (1992) and later compiled in The Shock of Arrival from which the following lines are quoted. ‗Aunt Chinna‘ is the story of a grand aunt being told to the poet her mother,

Do you recall your old aunt Chinna, the night you turned seven?

249

She tells how Aunt Chinna was loved by the poet‘s grandmother, but after that, after their father died, things became different __

It was her mind, child. After he died what was left for her?

Chinna who was not quite right in the head, filched and hoarded scraps of thread and sewing,

samplers with little mottos Honour thy Mother and thy Father Home is best and other such sayings the English woman taught her

She could slip the needle through and knot the cotton, so little showed. Sometimes her silk had the sheen of a hummingbird‘s wing flashing under the bent vine.(52)

But as Chinna‘s lunacy grew and she spent the nights in the mud and ran through the village with her clothes streaming,

Your uncle Paulos almost hung her in his rage.

Once he gave chase with five armed men he almost had a private army then, the mahout I think snared her with his thong thick as a man‘s neck.

Poor Chinna, snooked like a wild chicken. I hate to think of what happened to her.

All her stitching stopped.

She crouched by the mango tree in its crust of dirt hiding the coiled menstrual cloths, the heaps of paper on which she wrote her name

Over and over in all the languages she thought the earth contained. 250

Bits from Revelation her favourite book, songs that little children sing when fever drives them under the mother‘s wing. (54)

The final lines hint at scandal,

The fern leaves mother set in a porcelain bowl by the window ledge to see if their spores would hatch, fell to the floor

They clacked their tongues about Aunt Chinna‘s thighs and would not stop.

Next morning when the elders took themselves to church the ripe red berries in the silver dish took up the chorus

And their fruity gossip lit up all the parlour. (56-7)

Aunt Chinna is mentioned in Meena Alexander‘s prose work, Faultlines: A Memoir

(1993) where in her grandmother‘s house as a child, she goes with the aunt to the well and sees a drowned woman inside. Aunt Chinna will at first not answer her question but when a servant blurts out that it was shame, the aunt says firmly, ―They were found with child‖ and that, ―They could not carry the dishonour‖. In Faultlines,

Alexander recalls stories of countless well jumping women at this household. (108)

Aunt Chinna was good at embroidery, She could slip the needle through…and her silk had the sheen/of a hummingbird‘s wing‘. (52-7) The poem highlights the violence on women that takes place in the family __ an army led by the uncles give chase and truss her up, ‗I hate to think of what happened to her. /All her stitching stopped‘, with its allusion to ‗all smiles stopped‘ in Browning‘s poem ‗My Last 251

Duchess‘ __ even as Aunt Chinna hides in the cobra‘s hole, ‗samplers with little mottos / Honour thy Mother and thy Father/Home is best‘. Aunt Chinna‘s embroidery recalls two poems ___ one by Adrienne Rich, ‗Aunt Jennifer‘s Tigers‘ in A Change of

World (1951) where the long suffering,

Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool Find even the ivory needle hard to pull. The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand. When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by (19)

and the other titled "Eunice" by Eunice de Souza where,

Eunice, Embroidery Sister said: this petticoat you've cut these seams are worthy, of an elephant my dear. (53)

Eunice mutters ‗"silly bra-less/bitch." Her classmates complain: "Eunice is writing bad/words/sister‘.

Each of these poems in their own way tell what women‘s embroidery implies __ a traditionally feminine submissive activity made subversive. Of the three poems it is

Alexander‘s poem with its portrayal of violence (and possible violation), the madness with hoarding of embroidery, the subversion of the embroidered words ‗Home is best‘, and the parody of embroidery in the images of fern leaves that, ‗clacked their tongues /about Aunt Chinna‘s thighs‘. The poem brings to mind Kamala Das‘s poem about the pregnant maid who hanged herself in the privy, and recalled as a childhood memory. In Das‘s poem, ―Nani‘, the grandmother simply refuses to acknowledge

Nani‘s having ever existed. In Alexander‘s poem, the poet remembers her mother telling her the details of a brutal chase and capture of aunt Chinna by an army of five men led by an uncle. Again, like the grandmother‘s silence about Nani, the mother‘s 252 comment in ‗Aunt Chinna‘, __ I hate to think of what happened to her. / All her stitching stopped __ conveys the terror through what is left unsaid. Alongside the madness and violence regarding the aunt, there is the other world of the parlour where women gossip. This world of gossip is shown in Kamala Das‘s poetry, in the voices of the world that tell the poet not to be deviant, but to, ‗Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook, / Be a quarreller with servants‘. Vigilante women‘s voices are also heard in de Souza‘s poems about the Goan Christian community.

All her stitching stopped in Meena Alexander‘s poem, indicates embroidery itself as an activity that disturbs the household; embroidery is creating patterns out of bits of thread, and other stuff, a form of collage or pastiche and Aunt Chinna ‗filches‘ stuff for her embroidery. Embroidery seems to become a metaphor for women‘s writing, fragmentary, patched, filched (from male language) and transformed into beauty

(humming bird‘s wings) and then silenced.

In her title poem in Atmospheric Embroidery (2015) Meena Alexander writes of the artist Boetti:

In Boetti‘s embroidery, in his mapping of the world Everything is cut and coupled,

Occult ordering – silk and painted steel Sun and electric moon, butterfly and naked man

In The Thousand Longest Rivers The Nile is the hardest water

Then comes the Mississippi – Missouri. Once we lived by brilliant waters

Suffered the trees soft babble, Fissures in magma.

Already its August – Season of snipers in the heartland,

Season of coastlines slit by lightning And smashed bouquets of the salt spray rose. 253

Now I think it‘s a miracle we were able, ever To put one foot in front of the other and keep on walking. (5)

The reference to Boetti‘s exhibition is made in in the poem itself. Even if the reader is not already familiar with Boettti‘s work it is easy to find it online and learn of The

Thousand Longest Rivers or Mappa and how Boetti overturns dominant ideas and systems through his art ___

For each of his Mappe, Boetti traced a world map onto canvas, colored it according to the national flag of each country, and then gave the canvas to Afghan craftswomen to use as the base for a tapestry‘.37

Alexander‘s tribute to Boetti is a salute to a kindred soul, whose vision of the world and of his craft is that of the collage, palimpsest, and connectivity.

The theme of collage and the metaphor of the fabric or garment pervades

Meena Alexander‘s language. Divinity for her is the ‗coat of many colours‘ as she says in ‗Impossible Grace‘, in Landscape With Buried Stones written from her

Jerusalem visit. The various gates of Jerusalem are named by her as entry points, finally ending with,

At Golden gate, Where rooftops ring with music, I glimpse your face. You have a coat of many colors — impossible grace. 38 (62-3)

In an interview series titled ‗Questions of Faith‘ with Dianne Bilyak, Meena

Alexander says,

As a woman I felt I was barred from my own body in some terrible way by the edicts of the religion I grew up in. At the same time I felt the enormous richness of the Biblical tradition and emotions vested in it. ...Then there was Hinduism all around; in India and later when I went to Sudan, Islam. I was very moved by the idea of the god of love, Krishna… My husband is Jewish and my late father-in-law was a rabbi… In my poems you will find elements of Hinduism and Buddhism. I recently spent a month in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. My time in Jerusalem consisted of living in the walled city just inside Herod's gate in the twelfth century Indian hospice and then in a home 254

on Chain Street where my windows opened onto the esplanade of the Wailing Wall and across that wall was Al Aqsa mosque. And beyond the ancient buildings, hidden from sight, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There is so much desire for sanctity in that city and so much separation—the great music of human prayers, in that city of golden stone. I am writing some poems about the experience. One is called "Impossible Grace" and has come out in Tri Quarterly Online.39

In the same interview with Bilyak, Meena Alexander says that religion and poetry have a more natural pairing in India than elsewhere:

I could walk by a stone in the town where I was born and that stone or a tree would be worshipped as a site of divinity. Poetry surely partakes of this and there is an ancient tradition in India that allows for this, however much one's work may be part of a Modernist or even Postmodernist field. So words exist in a different air.

Meena Alexander‘s personal assimilation of various religions is a route to grace. In India, ironically this grace is shown to be denied and replaced by religious intolerance. For an Indian poet such as Kamala Das therefore, the question of religion remains fraught, as in her poem ‗An Inheritance‘ where religion is simply

‗our father‘s lunacy babbling in three different tongues‘ from temple, church and mosque, preaching a cult of violent intolerance. But Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza and the other modern Indian poets are in their personal lives and their poetry through their feminism and their postcolonial subjectivities, sensitive and responsive to the poetry in religion just as they reject the structures and prejudices of organized religion.

Meena Alexander‘s poetry and philosophy draw heavily on her travelling life and her academic life. Enriched as it is by her location in multiple places, it is also a story of dislocations and being as she says, ‗without place‘, a position that is fraught with sensations of violent tearing and bleeding. In her interview with Tharu, just before she left for the U.S. to live there, Meena Alexander read a poem, ‗To All

Exiles‘ from an early book Without Place (1977) : 255

Without place time has no audible limits. Into our space fine winds flash. Steel threads taut through a mask. Our lips must gash to speak. (Alexander and Tharu, 13)

Alexander explains,

The face of the slave / the exile, as a mask. And so the very body, as it is given to the exile, to grasp, must gash, if there is to be speech. (13)

The face of the woman too is fraught; it must be hidden from view. ‗Her Mother‘s

Words‘ is advice given to the daughter, to hide. The poem is from her early volume, I

Root My Name from Writers Workshop, Kolkata. (1977) Alexander includes the poem in her 1996 collection, The Shock of Arrival, with explanation that,

It is woman as prisoner of her sex that touched me, a difficult awareness that once led me to a study of Mary Wollstonecraft, writer, revolutionary, radical feminist... But the borders here are different, the edges blurring. I am Indian here, in a way I never was in the subcontinent, in a way I never needed to be. (67)

In ‗Her Mother‘s Words‘, Meena Alexander writes,

If you sit in a dark room no light behind you no one passing in the street can see my mother said to me. …. How should I write these line without a light, how should I see? I asked myself not knowing that the street had such a vision of my woman‘s soul as I should scarcely understand. Now I know my hands grow cold and sight spills out of me. (67)

256

Meena Alexander‘s, ‗the street / had such a vision of my woman‟s soul / as I should scarcely understand‘, alludes in terms of theme as well as cadence to the third poem in T. S Eliot‘s ‗Preludes‘ __ ‗You had such a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands‟, which too was about the lonely woman. That Alexander re-visions these lines rewrites the modernist angst from the woman‘s point of view, as it were. A woman from a non-western world, an /other world. In the explanation of the poem, in

The Shock of Arrival, Alexander writes of this poem,

I am Indian here, in a way I never was in the subcontinent, in a way I never needed to be. And my femaleness is complicit with a radicalized awareness. (67-8)

The poem evokes Imtiaz Dharker‘s purdah poems, discussed later in this chapter.

Thus Alexander‘s experiences as a woman in India have similarities as well as differences from her experiences of being a woman elsewhere.

As a diaspora poet Alexander‘s construction of India, based on childhood memories, and later on, a diasporic perspective, is different too from the concerns of women poets whose adult lives have been lived in India. Alexander‘s ‗Diary of

Dreams‘ represents this, as the poet talks of the Gandhian aura over her childhood and the atomic blast conducted by Indian scientists under the desert sands of Pokhran.

There is the generalized sensory romantic perspective, ‗Salt fumes /in a red desert‘, yet, it is also part of her politically engaged oeuvre, not only in terms of global crises in the present day world, but also her poems on India in River and Bridge,

(Toronto:1996; New Delhi: 1997) where the poems, ‗For Sardar Hashmi Beaten to

Death Just Outside Delhi‘ and ‗Moloyashree‘ retell and mourn the brutal political killing of a street theatre performer in India, and his wife Moloyashree‘s return three days later, with a troupe of players, to the site of the killing to continue and finish the interrupted play. This level of political engagement in poetry is absent from the 257 modern poets under study here, although Kamala Das has poems with political comments as discussed in the chapter on her poetry, and Sarojini Naidu was a political figure, whose later poetry expresses her politics.

Thus Alexander‘s poetry seen as a corpus, has certain common points of intersection with the poets in Nine Indian Women Poets, but much that is different.

Some of these differences are in common with diaspora poets such as Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker. Of the modern Indian women poets writing in English, it is

Alexander who represents, for better or worse, the spirit of contemporary ‗globalism‘.

In her earlier volumes, this is manifest through a pastiche of historical and geographical references and images, in her later volumes it is more overt and the referenced texts are from music, painting and other art forms, from museums and monuments. Alexander‘s location in academia is an integral part of her poetry, not only in the logistic details of her publications, but also in her criticism and prose that often seeks to explains the poetry. From Illiterate Hearts onwards most of her poetry has been published in academic presses __ Illiterate Hearts (2003), Raw Silk: Poems

(2004), Quickly Changing River (2004), and Birthplace with Buried Stones all came out from North Western University Press. Impossible Grace: Jerusalem Poems

(2012) was published by the Centre for Jerusalem Studies, Al-Quds University, and

Dreaming in Shimla, (2015) by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Given this seamless connection between her poetry and her theorizations of place, displacement, globalism, post colonialism, identity, violence, feminism, along with the incorporation of literary and other texts into the poetry gives her poetry, for all its articulation of the sensory and the emotional, a different texture from what may be found in poets such as Imtiaz Dharker who too deals with the above themes, but without the poetry being discursive. For Alexander, even as she, to use a phrase by Kamala Das, ‗must extrude 258 autobiography‘, the close links between her poetry and contemporary discourses, makes her poems relevant at several levels. As a woman poet Meena Alexander is exceptional in her consolidation of her work through the active platform of her webpage. Imtiaz Dharker too uses this postmodern forum of the personal webpage, although without the academic‘s notes, and explanations. Alexander‘s website with their notes on many of the poems, her innumerable interviews, poetry readings, the sheer size of her oeuvre makes her a very visible poet online, compared to diaspora poets such as Sujata Bhatt who has a substantial oeuvre, or even Imtiaz Dharker who has a website too. Eunice de Souza, who too writes of her life in her poetry, or in a novel such as Dangerlok, who too was until her retirement, a University professor of

English Literature and a critic and anthologist, does not allow the academic to seep into the literary through discourses on her poetry or through use of footnotes.

Alexander‘s poetry shows a consciousness shaped by scripts. Referring to the two line verses in Birthplace with Buried Stones, Alexander says in her interview ‗Journeys‘ with Jeannie Vanasco:

I‘ve long been enticed by the Japanese aesthetic. There‘s a kind of profusion in Indian classical forms that I grew up with. Very sensual. And there‘s something in the Japanese sense of restraint and the economy of line that I find attractive. (Web)

In the same interview, she speaks of the merging of the bodily experience and ‗the creation of poems‘, and the poem‘s ability to capture the ephemerality of the experience into permanence.

Now Bashō, I love the fact that in the journey to the Deep North he is putting his body out there and walking. And he‘s walking the whole distance. And the things he writes about are things he experiences, but there are also lines about memory and the creation of the poems. It‘s a book tinged by that horizon of mortality, ephemeral, things that pass and change as we do. (Web)

259

The presence of ‗scripts‘ in her cognitive world is evident in her poems written as a conversation as it were with another poet. The note to her poem ‗Stump

Work‘ in Birthplace With Buried Stone states how she composed the poem in conversation with Donne‘s poems after seeing the Westmoreland Manuscript in the

Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. She explains that the title ‗Stump

Work‘ comes from the seventeenth century form of raised embroidery, of elaborate design, often stuffed with fabric or hair. (127) She speaks of this also in an interview with Jeannie Vanasco,

I printed out the sonnets from the Internet and put double spaces between the lines and in the spaces wrote each of my lines, a species of poetic hatching. In this way, I made a cycle of poems called ―Stump Work.‖ (Web)

In all these respects she has a unique oeuvre. Alexander herself refers to this aspect of her poetry and her life as ‗fault-lines‘, the title of her memoir, published by the Feminist Press of CUNY. The very nature of her personal history makes footnotes and references essential to her poetry. In Faultlines (1993) Meena Alexander states her first thoughts on being asked to write a memoir,

What of all the cities and small towns and villages I have lived in since birth….what of all the languages compacted in my brain….How would I map all this in a book of days? After all my life did not fall into the narratives I had been told to honour, tales that closed back on themselves, as a snake might, swallowing its own ending: birth, an appropriate education ___ not too much, not too little ____ an arranged marriage to a man of suitable birth and background, somewhere within the boundaries of India.[…] time does not come fluid and whole into my trembling hands. All that is here comes piecemeal.[…] How shall I configure my ―I‖ as Other, image this life that I lead, here, now, in America? What could I ever be but a mass of faults, a fault mass? I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. (2-3)

This is followed by a long excerpt explaining the meaning of ‗fault‘ through citations from a series of books __ ‗deficiency‘, ‗defect‘, ‗fragmented‘, composed of ‗jumbled fragments‘, and so on. She concludes the piece, the first one in her book, Fault Lines: 260

A Memoir, by describing her memoir as ‗rag of words wrapped around the shard of recollection. A book with torn ends visible. Writing in search of a homeland.‘ But she also acknowledges that hers is not a unique condition of being splintered by fault lines, when she refers to a phone conversation with a friend, Roshni, about her memoir, about the ‗difficulty of living in space‘, and says,

I could hear her breathing on the other end, all the way from Sonoma County, California; dear Roshni who has lived in Bombay, Karachi, Beirut, Oaxaca, and Boston. And then her gentle laughter. (4)

Fault Lines places in context Meena Alexander‘s poetry, its pastiche style, as well as the emotional content, and its dense intertextualities. It also connects poetry by Indian women not only to diaspora but re-contextualizes the legacies of Sarojini Naidu,

Kamala Das and others against a larger canvas of contemporary times and global space.

Alexander had gone to Khartoum, then to U.K. for her Ph.D. and returned to

India, to Hyderabad to teach, first at Central Institute of English and Foreign

Languages and then at the University of Hyderabad, where she met her husband to be,

David Lelyveld, an American Jewish professor, scholar, and author of books on

Muslim history in Aligarh, Urdu and Hindi, and aspects of modern Indian history.

Alexander went away to live in the U.S.

Sujata Bhatt, (1956) like Meena Alexander left India at the age of five. Sujata Bhatt lived in the U.S. for a few childhood years, returned to India completed her schooling in Poona. In an interview with Vicki Bertram, Sujata Bhatt explains,

‗….some of the crucial years of my childhood took place in India - in Gujarat and in Maharashtra to be more precise. I find it difficult to summarise or 'explain' my childhood.[…]I left India twice: first to New Orleans from the time I was five until I was eight, when we returned to India - and then later to Connecticut 'for good' when I was twelve. […]So for my undergraduate studies I went to a small liberal arts college near Baltimore, Goucher College. And after my first year I was actually glad to be there.[…]After college I 261

worked at a variety of jobs (especially as a research assistant at the JHU Medical School) for several years and I also travelled to Europe for the first time. Meanwhile I was still writing poetry. […] I wanted to return to an academic environment. […] I decided to apply to the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.[…] I moved to Germany shortly before Brunizem was published. My husband is German - he is also a writer. I had met him during my first semester at Iowa. He had been invited to participate in the International Writing Program. We had stayed in touch and there came a point when we felt that we would rather stay together than apart so I moved to Germany. I didn't know any German at the time. We communicated in English (which we still do) since his English is quite perfect. But then I did study German after I came over. And I do read a fair amount of poetry in German. ‗I had studied Spanish and French at college. Spanish, because I wanted to read Lorca in the original and French, because I wanted to get to the essence of Sartre. Ideally, I would like to be fluent in at least a hundred different languages. Each language offers a different perspective on life, a different way of organising the world. I find it tiresome and simplistic when people claim that one language is absolutely 'better' than another. ‗I am fascinated by Steven Pinker's work. In his book, The Language Instinct, Pinker demonstrates how language and thought are two different things and how thought is not dependent upon language - nor is it determined by language. And that thought is possible without language.‘ ( Bertram Web)

For the adult Meena Alexander arriving in the U.S. in 1979, and giving birth to her son in 1980, was a time for many adjustments and exposures. For Bhatt who arrived in the U.S. as a child of eight along with her parents, and completed her education and worked there, the U. S. must have become home. It was Germany where she moved after marriage, and where English is not spoken, and she did not speak

German then, that language must have proven a challenge. So although both

Alexander and Bhatt are Indian diaspora poets, the contexts of their experiences in the U.S. and in Khartoum for Alexander, and in Germany for Bhatt, are very different. Their poetry too is different in tone and the mediation of language. Certain themes are common, such as exile, memories of India, intertextualities, in terms of

Indian as well as non-European texts (literature, painting, sculpture) but their negotiations of these themes are different. Bhatt has lived in the West since childhood, she had lived with her parents. Alexander began living in the U.S. as a 262 wife and mother. This difference in their acculturation is evident in the different ways in which these two poets negotiate their diasporic experience. A 2011 doctoral dissertation, ―The Cassandras in Exile: A Study of the Diasporic Sensibility in the

Poetry of Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Moniza Alvi and Jean Arasanayagam‖, points to the calmer assimilation of the diasporic experience in Bhatt‘s poetry. Nimvat cites poems such as ‗The One who Goes Away‘ in Sujata Bhatt‘s Point No Point (1997) where the poet says,

I am the one who always goes away with my home which can only stay inside in my blood-my home which does not fit with any geography. (Nimvat 87)

The diaspora poets‘ negotiation of experience involves all histories, geographies, and contemporary politics. Whereas Alexander takes a stand on contemporary public issues in the U.S. Bhatt‘s move to Germany with its own legacy of 20th century history involves an examination of what it means to live in Germany today in homes and locations that contain the histories of lives destroyed during the Holocaust years.

In ‗Mozartstrasse 18‘ in Monkey Shadows (1991) with a dedication, ‗for Eleanor

Wilner, who first asked me to describe post-war Bremen‘, Bhatt describes the street with its houses

wondering where guilt ends and where it begins (57)

and says, as she watches

while the children dig in the sandbox and the sixteen-month-old boy I‘m looking after, pours sand onto my lap. 263

I don‘t see how guilt could possibly begin here. (57)

She dreams of a crowd of persons, formally dressed ‗in black and white‘, and

Not a word is spoken but they all greet me and point to this house, number 18. . . . It is one thing to know what happened before but quite another to live here today and to find out precisely who lived where in 1937, 1938…

To look through the original Bremer Adressbuch, complete with advertisements. and then to follow up with 1983 statistics. Who was arrested, shot. Who got sent to Minsk, who escaped… (58-9)

She finds out for instance that the Reiss family who lived at number 25, with two children had gone away to the USA. Their house is no longer there. But number 18

Mozartstrasse still stands. As Bhatt speaks to the landlady she hears of the disarray that had been in the room when it had been taken over by her, that the room had been the workshop of a Jewish tailor, of the hundreds of needles in the walls the landlady had found. The poet relives what had happened in these rooms,

Who threw everything onto the floor? Who took the sewing machines? Who took the clothes? I see rivers full of needles, flickering wet gills, and in a shifting trick of sunlight they could be just hatched salmon I watch from a cliff top… (60-1)

As Bhatt the Asian American married to a German and living in Germany, there are other ways of making sense of the history of what happened to the tailor in

Mozarstrasse. It comes through a poem about her grandmother, ‗Devibahen Pathak‘, 264 in the same collection Monkey Shadows. The lines from ‗Mozartstrasse 18‘ ___ ‗who lived where / in 1937, 1938…‘ becomes connected to a day in 1938, when Devibahen

Pathak living in Gujarat, goes with her daughter ( the poet‘s mother) to the jeweller‘s with a lump of gold to fashion into a necklace with a swastika pendant ( the Hindu sacred symbol which is almost like the German swastika)

But it is 1938 and the goldsmith reminds her of the latest news: (aray bahen, tamnay khabar nathi…?) Oh bhen, don‘t you know…? (48)

Even as the tailor tell her about Hitler and the swastika, Devibhen Pathak remains unbelieving, reposing her faith in the swastika pattern she has set for the necklace in mind.

Who was Hitler? Mahatma Gandhi was her daily news, her truth. (48)

The poet, the grand daughter who has inherited the necklace feels troubled about it.‘

She writes

So many old religions fatten on arguments, on fresh murders or do they call that offerings? Someone‘s blood, someone‘s money someone‘s wife, someone‘s son should not have been touched. She then address her own daughter born of a German father, Oh my German-born daughter, …. What will you say? What colours will you prefer? In what language will you speak?‘ (50-1)

The poem indicates how different histories were happening in 1938 with the holocaust in Germany where Bhatt would live after her marriage with a German poet and fellow student, and Gandhi‘s ahimsa or non-violent mass, struggle in India. Gandhi who 265 hailed from her native state of Gujarat, India. Bhatt is also critical of certain aspects of her Hindu and Indian heritage, just as Eunice de Souza is of her Goan Christian community. In a poem ‗What Happened to the Elephant‘, in Monkey Shadows, she recalls the childhood curiosity about the headless carcass of the elephant whose head, according to the myth, had been grafted on Ganesha‘s head, after he had been beheaded by Shiva,. Now in her mature years she writes how,

the others in his herd, the hundreds in his family must have found him. … How they turned and turned in a circle, with their trunks facing outwards and then inwards towards the headless one. That is a dance a group dance no one talks about. (Collected Poems 116-7)

Speaking of the diasporic women poets such as Meena Alexander and Sujata Bhatt and others, Nimavat writes that they are,

prophetic in the sense that they cry against the evils of terrorism, racialism, war, ethnic violence and gender discrimination. Like Cassandra, they say 'no' to easy complacence of our age. They speak out fearlessly and boldly. These diasporic women poets are displaced from their Troy and experience the agonies of exile and the loss of language and communication in one or the other way. Like Cassandra, they denigrate the hierarchy of traditional authority, the set stereotypes and political and cultural subordination. They oppose false cultural pretentions of their own countries and also the racial hegemony of their host countries. (111)

Bhatt‘s European poems, are many of them about poets, artists, painters, and artworks and most of these poems have notes and demand from the reader a scholarly attention. This is one common aspect of the two diaspora poets Meena

Alexander and Sujata Bhatt. In fact, written long before the move to Germany, ‗The title of her first book, Brunizem (1988), refers to the dark brown (bruni) prairie soil

(Russian zem) that can be found in Asia, Europe and North America, the three very 266

different worlds of her imagination‘, notes Cecile Sandten in the article, ‗In Her Own

Voice: Sujata Bhatt and the Aesthetic Articulation of the Diasporic Condition‘. The title Brunizem represents Bhatt‘s perception of the organically common elements of life. Sandten also notes of Sujata Bhatt, how,

In her second and third volumes, Monkey Shadows (1991) and The Stinking Rose (1995), she continues to fuse different cultures, environments and perspectives, writing with equally sensitive comprehension about other species and surroundings. As she has stated in an autobiographical essay, she now enjoys this hard-won, lucky versatility, this power to comprehend, interpret and thus enter into the depths of almost any environment by writing about it imaginatively. ‗‗It is also a power to control and give shape to any given environment in order not to be intimidated or overwhelmed by its foreignness.‘‘ 40

Brunizem appeared in 1988, the same year as Eunice de Souza‘s, Women in Dutch

Painting, and Meena Alexander‘s, House of a Thousand Doors. That these women poets were writing about experiences and in ways that are linked, suggests the common awareness of their location in the modern world.

Alexander and Bhatt have made inter-racial marriages and have children who are part European, Eunice de Souza is descended from Portuguese settlers/colonizers in

India. The religions these poets were born into are different, as are their mother tongues. For de Souza, by a twist of history it is only English, for Sujata Bhatt it is

Gujarati, while for Meena Alexander it is English and not Malayalam, because of her life away from her place of origin. Language for these poets therefore has complex meanings. If it has troubled Alexander and Bhatt, for Bhatt it has also led towards an understanding of linguistic history, as she states in Poem 2 of ‗A Different History‘ in Brunizem:

Which language has not been the oppressor‘s tongue? … And how does it happen that after the torture, after the soul has been cropped 267

with the long scythe swooping out of the conqueror‘s face – the unborn grandchildren grow to love that strange language. (Bhatt,Collected Poems 24)

This could be a description of Indian poets writing with such felicity in English today. The poem ‗Brunizem‘ with its subtitle, ‗for Michael‘ describes the poet‘s happiness at finding Michael, (the German friend Michael Augustin whom she married):

Brunizem, I say and brummagem. I have the jack of hearts in my pocket – yes he was waiting for me on a shelf in a thrift shop. But he is more than the jack of hearts and he kissed me…. (Bhatt, Collected Poems, 83)

The language difference appears in the poet‘s sleep ,

The other night I dreamt English was my middle name. And I cried, telling my mother ―I don‘t want English to be my middle name. Can‘t you change it to something else?‖ ―Go read the dictionary.‖ She said. I‘ve been meaning not to mean anything for once. I just want to say, ―brunizem!‖ I feel brunizem when this man kisses me I want to learn another language. (Bhatt, Collected Poems 83)

The poem is in Section III titled ‗Eurydice Speaks‘ in Brunizem In Section II , A

Different History of the same collection , the poem ‗Search of My Tongue‘ shows that for an Indian such as Bhatt, born into and raised in the mother tongue Gujarati, the matter of language is fraught too.

You ask me what I mean 268

by saying I have lost my tongue. I ask you, what would you do if you had two tongues in your mouth and lost the first one, the mother tongue, and could not really know the other, the foreign tongue. (Bhatt, Collected Poems 50)

She goes on to describe how she felt,

the mother would rot, rot and die in your mouth until you had to spit it out I thought I spit it out but overnight while I dream. (Bhatt,Collected Poems 50-1)

There now follow lines in Gujarati script transcribed phonetically in English and then translated as

it grows back, a stump of a shoot grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins, it ties the other tongue in knots, the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth, it pushes the other tongue aside. Everytime I think I've forgotten, I think I've lost the mother tongue, it blossoms out of my mouth. (Bhatt, Collected Poems 51)

This is the second poem in the sequence. The first poem too, has many lines in

Gujarati, transcribed and then translated, and narrates how she felt her tongue slipping away and out of her mouth and falling into the river. The third section shows the poet receiving a taped recording of her mother‘s voice sent to her from India. She tells her mother,

You talk to me, you say my name the way it should be said, apologising for the dogs barking outside for the laundryman knocking on the door, apologising because the woman selling eggplants is crying is crying door to door (reengna, reengna) door to door But do you know how I miss that old woman, crying (reengna, reengna)? 269

It‘s all right if the pedlar‘s brass bells ring out, I miss them too. You talk louder, the mailman comes, knocking louder, the crows caw-caw-cawing outside, the rickshaw‘s motor put-put-puttering. . . . You say (Sujubahen, huhvay tamaray matay tabla vagadu choo.) you say: listen to the tablas, listen: ………. (dha dhin dhin dha) …‘ (Bhatt, Collected Poems 54)

The tabla beats continue for several lines to conclude the poem. The poem, in both print and kindle versions has the Gujarati script before each of the English phonetics.

Referring to this poem, Paul Sharrad notes in ‗The Memory of the Tongue: Sujata

Bhatt‘s Diasporic Verse‘ that, ‗The text remains a zone of unresolved struggle/ dissonance that nonetheless points to the necessary ongoing process of translation‘.

(Sharrad, Web)

The second section of the poem where the mother- tongue grows and blossoms in the night, has been included as a stand-alone poem under the title ‗Search for my Tongue‘ in English schools for GCSE English and English Literature Assessment and

Qualifications Alliance (AQA) 41 The current AQA anthology has a poem each by

Nissim Ezekiel and Imtiaz Dharker. Seen in conjunction with Bhatt‘s wish to ‗learn a new language‘ expressed in the poem ‗Brunizem‘, and Meena Alexander‘s listing of the Malayalam lessons in the afternoons after English lessons in the morning, during childhood in Sudan, where Arabic was spoken around her all day, one may also sense an ambivalence regarding language. English is the chosen language of their poetry.

And for Bhatt, Gujarati, the language of childhood and kinship ties, before marriage to a person from another language, spills onto her English poetry, underlining her bilingual heritage. Speaking of the literature she read, from the Indian epics in 270 childhood to English, and later Irish poetry, and world literatures in translation, Bhatt says in the Carcanet interview with Vicki Bertram:

But all along I felt that no one really spoke for me, no one had a life as strangely disjointed as mine - and so I felt alone in my writing, I felt that my writing did not 'fit in' with either the Eastern or the Western tradition. The poem 'Search for My Tongue' (in Brunizem and in the Selected Poems) grew out of this feeling. It was only after Brunizem was completed that I started reading other Indian poets who were writing in English such as A.K. Ramanujan, Nissim Ezekiel and Jayanta Mahapatra - among many others. And yet, in many ways I also felt separate and different from these writers. (Bertram Web)

The fact that Bhatt was not acquainted with the modern Indian English poets until after Brunizem, partly explains the absence of a modernist angst that had shaped the poetry of Ezekiel, Mahapatra and Ramanujan.

Cecile Sandten feels that Bhatt‘s negotiation of diaspora is closer to Stuart Hall‘s definition,

The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‗‗identity‘‘ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.42

Whereas the Indian English poets such as Ezekiel and the women poets in India felt alienated within contemporary India, for Bhatt, India was childhood memory. Bhatt says of India,

In a way, it's all there in my poems. Poems such as 'Muliebrity', 'The Doors are Always Open', 'Buffaloes', 'Udaylee', 'Living with Trains', (from Brunizem) and 'Maninagar Days', 'Understanding the Ramayana', 'The Daily Offering', 'The Echoes in Poona', (from Monkey Shadows) and more recently the poems, 'A Memory from Marathi', 'After the Earthquake', 'The Pope, Tito and the WHO', and 'My Mother's Way of Wearing a Sari' (from Augatora) draw heavily upon my childhood experiences. For example, the girl who gathers cow dung in 'Muliebrity' is someone I saw on a daily basis. Of course, real incidents have to be transformed in some way to work as poems. In 'Buffaloes' I invent a character, 'the widow', but the memory of watching the buffaloes is mine. For some 271

reason (I'm not sure why) my imagination seems to be continually sparked by those early years in India. … And this departure from India, this 'loss', as I felt it, prevented me from taking India for granted. Ironically, exile brought me closer to India. Also, the poems in Brunizem were written mainly when I was in my early twenties. (When childhood is not too distant - and yet, for the first time, it's distant enough so that one can begin to view it with a little more objectivity.) (Bertram Web)

In a 1994 issue of Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Culture, a biannual arts magazine with some focus on the new literatures written in English, Bhatt along with poets from various parts of the world wrote pieces titled ‗Why I Write‘. In her piece, Bhatt writes,

In the last decade of the twentieth century, I see the poet as an ecologist conserving not only a vital dimension of language but also the human bonds connected with such language. Throughout the world, however, poetry affects the lives of very few people. It is a voice without amplifiers. The role of the poet is like that of a Greenpeace crusader in a tiny boat challenging a super tanker filled with chemical waste. And although the waste continues to be dumped in the seas, at least a few people are made aware of it. Ten years ago only a handful of people with a green chip on their shoulder seemed to care about our environment. Nowadays, significantly more people are seriously concerned about the problems of pollution, and the first steps are being taken to prevent greater catastrophes. Why, then, should the poet not hope that at the fin de siecle more people will realise how vital poetry is? (Bhatt ‗Why I Write‘, 555)

In the Contents listing for this issue of Kunapipi, Sujata Bhatt is placed under ‗United

Kingdom‘, while Gita Hariharan, Shashi Deshpande, Bharati Mukherjee Bapsi

Sidhwa and a few others are placed under ‗Pakistan and India‘. Bhatt who was by this time a resident of Germany living there with her German husband and daughter explains the matter of location in ‗Why I Write‘,

Recently, I've been a frequent visitor to the U.K. and Ireland, and I do read a great deal of the poetry that has been written and is being written here. My publisher is based in Manchester, so I feel directly involved in this poetry scene although my observations are those of an outsider. As an Indian who studied and lived in the U.S. for some time, now lives in Germany, and is today writing these lines from Spain, I wonder whether the 272

role of poetry today is really very different in all of the above mentioned countries. Bhatt, ‗Why I Write‘, Web)

Since location is in flux, the diaspora poets‘ representation of India cannot always be comparable to poets writing on Indian soil. What links them to Indian soil and Indian poetry however are their Indian roots, family and memory. Contemporary Indian poets in India represent contemporary India as lived experience. When contemporary

India is found in diaspora poets, it is mediated by news based themes that would resonate with a global audience, themes such as female foeticide for instance in

‗Voice of the Unwanted Girl‘ in Augatora (2000),where the aborted girl child tells her mother,

Mother, I am the one you sent away when the doctor told you I would be a girl ___ your second girl. (Collected Poems 318)

But good poetry is not just about borders, transnationalism and mediatized topics; image, sense, and sound convey experience and make for good poetry. Both Meena

Alexander and Sujata Bhatt write about childbirth.

Fear humps in me—a pregnancy. Who will do the embroidery on my little‘s one‘s skirt? …. Where is grandmother now? asks Alexander in ‗Migrant Memory‘ in Birthplace with Buried Stones (82). Bhatt‘s poem ‗The Need to Recall the Journey‘ with the dedication, ‗for Regina Munzel‘

(Monkey Shadows) expresses the process of birth in graphic detail,

Now when she cries for milk,

now as she drinks I drift back

to the moments when she was almost out

still part of me 273

but already I could reach down and touch her hair. (Collected Poems

178)

It describes birth in a way that, to most Indian readers, is new even today. As a critical article in the Indian literary e-journal Muse India, notes:

In this poem Bhatt narrates the process of actual birth, even the ‗unspeakable‘

details of the physical experience of birthing—the body in throes of labour

pains as the child is ‗about to slide out‘ and open, unhealed, bleeding wounds.

(Sutapa Chaudhuri Web)

What the Indian critic here refers to as ‗unspeakable‘ in quote marks, indicates the different social grammars of literature even in the contemporary world of global circuits of readership. Yet through its speaking of the ‗unspeakable‘ Bhatt‘s poem brings to the reader the emotional and biological sensations of happy childbirth.

Bhatt also writes about, as Sutapa Chaudhuri notes, ‗a mother choosing to abort her girl child in ‗Voice of the Unwanted Girl‘. There is also a poem addressed to the child in the womb, presumably in early pregnancy, in ‗Pink Shrimps and Guesses‘ in

Brunizem where the mother asks,

Hey, are you there already, already am I your mother? Today I tried to imagine your nose, your eyebrows, the shape your legs will take. Whether you‘ll climb trees easily, whether you‘ll cry easily. Today I wanted you to talk to me. Tell me what you want. Tell me, because I don‘t know. …… do my dreams keep you awake, do I taste good already, can you trust me? (Bhatt Collected Poems 46)

274

The asexual yet extremely sensory experience of childbirth is strongly evoked here.

Eunice de Souza in her note on Sujata Bhatt for Nine Indian Women Poets writes that

Bhatt‘s ‗White Asparagus‘ is the ‗only successful erotic poem in Indian writing in

English‘. (71). It is also the most anthologised.

Bhatt‘s grasp of the natural world through poems about animals, especially poems about monkeys, show a convergence of mythology, modern science and the purely instinctive. The work of Bhatt‘s father, a virologist working at first in India, and then in universities and research institutes in the U.S. and Bhatt‘s own education in science informs her poetry. In Monkey Shadows, her poem, ‗The Stare‘, notes how,

There is that moment when the young human child stares at the young monkey child who stares back. (Bhatt Collected Poems 93).

She then compares the different ways in which the two creatures, the human child and the monkey child process information, that how both are yet innocent and have yet to learn fear,

Still the monkey looks at the human not in the same way he would look at leaves or at his own siblings. And the human looks at the monkey knowing this is some totally other being. (Bhatt Collected Poems 93-4).

She asks us to

Remember, the human child is at that age when he begins to use words with power but without the distance of alphabets, of abstractions 275

…. While the young monkey child grows at a different rate, looks at a tree, a bush, at the human child and thinks… Who knows what? (Bhatt Collected Poems 94-5).

The last stanza underlines the gentleness of this childhood stare, and keeps the poem open in its last line:

What remains burning is that moment of staring: the two newly formed heads balanced on fragile necks tilting towards each other, the monkey face and the human face absorbing each other with intense gentleness … (Bhatt Collected Poems 95)

In response to a question about ―a number of poems, especially in Monkey Shadows, that explore scientific themes‖, Bhatt replies, ―if I'm writing about another species then I like to know as much as possible about that species - even if I don't use all the information in the poem‘. It is not just animals but plants, and the elements, such as water, that she has written poems on. Bhatt says of these poems:

My laboratory poems are all drawn from my experiences - they were unexpected, unplanned poems as most of my poems are - they were poems that needed to be written. My desire to research certain topics such as the plant 'garlic' for certain poems in The Stinking Rose or to know more about the patterns of waves and floods (in addition to reading historical documents) for my poem 'The Hole in the Wind' in Augatora is no doubt an influence from the scientific approach. It is a desire to be accurate and precise. (Bertram Web)

Bhatt‘s aesthetic sensibility, like her polyglot sensibility transforms the unlikeliest of subjects into poetry. In ‗Muliebrity‘ in Brunizem, she writes,

I have thought so much about the girl who gathered cow dung in a wide, round basket along the main road passing by our house …. 276

I have thought so much about the way she moved her hands and her waist and the smell of cow dung and road-dust and wet canna lilies, the smell of monkey breath and freshly washed clothes and the dust from crows‘ wings which smells different – and again the smell of cow dung as the girl scoops it up, all these smells surrounding me separately and simultaneously. (Bhatt Collected Poems 17)

The iteration of ‗I have thought so much about…‘ conveys the poet‘s sensory response. This thinking so much about is not an intellectual process. Bhatt explains it herself in the next few lines,

….I have thought so much but have been unwilling to use her for a metaphor, for a nice image. (Collected Poems 17)

The last lines allow the visual image to convey all __

but most of all unwilling to forget her or to explain to anyone the greatness and the power glistening through her cheekbones each time she found a particularly promising mound of dung __ (Collected Poems 17)

To come out and say things that are stripped of extraneous value, to unabashedly express the poetic, marks Bhatt‘s oeuvre. ‗I feel that poetry is a place where things can be questioned and examined‘ says Bhatt. Yet in the midst of all the poetry on a wide range of themes, there is also a poem such as, ‗What is Worth Knowing‘ which cuts like a fevered scream from a mind bombarded by knowledges __ from the news, folk lore, encyclopaedic nuggets, and wild imaginings of a mind in fever. The poem seems to unleash a chaos of knowledge. It seems to be a self-reflexive critique, a hopelessness about her own poetic craft. Published in Brunizem (1988) it pre-empts the hopelessness of another poet, Meena Alexander in the poem titled ‗No Rescue

(With Toy Cars)‘, the last poem in her 2015 collection Atmospheric Embroidery.

Alexander writes, 277

You thought that by crossing all these seas Writing all these poems something would happen But nothing has happened… (66 )

For Alexander, many of whose poems and much of whose prose is critical of women‘s oppression, religious and racial intolerance, and much else, these lines express a sense of disappointment. She refers to unfeeling gods who hold the handkerchief folded over and over again __ a metaphor for history‘s repeated bloodstains. Alexander‘s poem ends with the image of the peddler who

. . . cries out in a hoarse Voice, old man with rusty bicycle, toy cars tied to the Handlebars, tiny plastic things in the grey colors Of the sea gates of your city. (66 )

Is it despair over the continuing inequality in her native country which a lifetime of poetry and writing has not been able to heal? As the last poem in Atmospheric

Embroidery, it also resonates with story of Alexander‘s great -aunt Chinna, whose embroidery had stopped abruptly after her brutal capture. Both these diaspora poets have self-avowed poetic purpose and show in these poems a moment of fatigue. A fatigue that is somehow reminiscent of the sleep of the unemployed in Tara Patel‘s poem discussed earlier in this chapter.

Imtiaz Dharker, like Sujata Bhatt and Meena Alexander is found in most foreign anthologies and international poetry journals, but is often missed in Indian anthologies. Dharker‘s negotiation of diasporic experience has more in common with

Meena Alexander. Dharker writes in the poem, ‗Minority‘, in Postcards from God.

(1994) Dharker‘s second volume of poems, and published in India.

I was born a foreigner I carried on from there To become a foreigner everywhere I went, even in the place planted with my relatives‘ (157)

278

Twenty years later, on Wednesday 17 December 2014, Mark Brown, arts correspondent of The Guardian wrote,

The Pakistan-born British poet Imtiaz Dharker has been awarded the Queen‘s gold medal for poetry, joining an illustrious roll call that includes WH Auden, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Buckingham Palace announced on Wednesday that Dharker would be the 2014 recipient of a prestigious prize created in 1933 by George V at the suggestion of the then poet laureate John Masefield. The current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, selected this year‘s committee ―of eminent men and women of letters‖ who selected Dharker; chosen on the basis of her new collection, Over the Moon, and a lifetime‘s contribution to poetry. Duffy paid tribute. ―Whether Imtiaz Dharker writes of exile, childhood, politics or grief, her clear-eyed attention brings each subject dazzlingly into focus,‖ she said. ―She makes it look easy, this clarity and economy, but it is her deft phrasing, wit and grace that create this immediacy.‖ … Duffy said Dharker drew together her three countries, Pakistan, Britain and India, to create ―writing of the personal and the public with equal skill‖. 43

Dharker receiving the news of the honour said,

―It reminds me how Britain has opened its heart to many kinds of poetry and somehow recognised and made space for the unexpected voice.‖44

The Guardian also mentioned in its report on her medal that ‗Dharker‘s poems are studied by GCSE and A-level students throughout Britain and, with Poetry Live!, she reads to more than 25,000 students a year‘. Dharker‘s visibility as a poet in Britain seems to vindicate to an extent the task of the poet as a catalyst for social change as stated by Sujata Bhatt.

Dharker‘s first volume of poems Purdah and Other Poems was published by

Oxford University Press, Delhi, in 1989. An early review of the book Salil Tripathi,

‗Veiled Cry‘. in INDIA TODAY.IN, June 15, 1989 stated,

the purdah which has often been used in Islamic societies as the ultimate symbol of paternalistic oppression of women, gets a life of its own. It is a state of mind…(Tripathi Web)

279

Purdah was reprinted by Bloodaxe, U.K. along with the 1994 collection Postcards from God that had been first published by Viking Penguin, New Delhi. The new title for the combined collection of 1997 was Postcards from God. Perhaps there was marketing logic behind this as ‗Purdah‘ might have alienated many British readers whereas Postcards from God would have a wider resonance. Be that what it may, the poems in Purdah written from Dharker‘s experience of growing up as a first generation Muslim girl in Glasgow reflect the double bind of the purdah. The book is divided into four sections. In the first section, titled ‗Purdah‘, the first poem ‗Purdah

I‘ shows the garment imposed on the girl to cover her pubertal body, to make her learn ‗shame‘, and describes how it changes her from outside, a different silhouette, but now she is also regarded differently,

People she has known stand up, sit down as they have always done. But they make different angles in the light, their eyes aslant, a little sly. (Dharker 1997, 14)

Dharker‘s lines makes the poem transcend religion specific veiling, when she writes of the purdah clad girl,

She half-remembers things from someone else‘s life, perhaps from yours, or mine – carefully carrying what we do not own: between the thighs a sense of sin.

We sit still, letting the cloth grow a little closer to our skin. A light filters inward through our bodies‘ walls. Voices speak inside us, echoing in the places we have just left. (Dharker 1997, 14)

280

‗You and I‘ draws in the reader and the poet into the purdah clad girl‘s identity, with the ‗we‘ that now replaces the third person pronoun ‗she‘. In the next stanza the girl‘s inner division makes the girl ‗stand outside herself‘,

Wherever she goes, she is always inching past herself, as if she were a clod of earth and the roots as well, scratching for a hold between the first and second rib. (Dharker 1997, 14-5)

The rib alludes to the creation of woman from Adam‘s rib, a story common to both

Christian and Islamic texts. But trying to find a hold like an uprooted plant, trying to find a hold between first and second rib also conveys the girl‘s scramble for an interstitial space. For a girl, covered by purdah for the first time then, these are the sensations. But already in this first poem of her first collection, Dharker is showing the tremendous power of suggestion in her lines, to make the poems mean things at several levels, and to expand to a wider world. It is in the next poem ‗Purdah II‘ that the context is given more detail, the turning of Muslim girls in a foreign land towards the practices of their religion and then their turning away from its patriarchal stranglehold. The muezzin‘s cry offers succor,

In the tin box of your memory a coin of comfort rattles against the strangeness of a foreign land (Dharker 1997, 16)

and the customs and rituals of familiar figures offer a sense of belonging

Years of sun were concentrated into Maulvi‘s fat dark finger hustling across the page, nudging words into your head; words unsoiled by sense, pure rhythm on the tongue. The body, rocked in time with twenty others, was lulled into thinking it had found a home. (Dharker 1997, 16-7) 281

Dharker‘s poem came out in 1989, in India when she was living here. In 1985,

Kamala Das, then a converted Muslim wrote under her new name ‗Suraiya‘ a poem where she talks of her being seduced into the religion by a man, but now she is as disappointed as she had been in the stone gods. In Kamala Das: Collected Poems edited by Devindra Kohli, and ‗signed, Suraiya, 22 may 2005‘ from ‗Personal Poetry‘

Unpublished MS (2004-5), she writes in ‗Gracious Allah‘,

Compulsive speaker of truth I thought you guileless but you used his brown riveting eyes To lure me on. And afterwards, his Perfidy made me want to flee, to return to the arid tracts I had traversed, the deserts of the soul. Sand more sand and idols carved of stone (Dharker 1997, 185)

Here is the case of a Hindu woman, Kamala Das converting to Islam and expressing her thoughts on her conversion, and the case of the Pakistan born, Muslim woman

Imtiaz Dharker, now married to a Hindu and writing in similar vein about the seductions of religion for young girls.

In ‗Purdah II‘ Dharker speaks of the Muslim girls of her childhood in Glasgow where she grew up,

They have all been sold and bought, the girls I knew, unwilling virgins who had been taught, especially in this strangers‘ land, to bind their brightness tightly round, whatever they might wear, in the purdah of the mind. (Dharker 1997, 18)

282

Dharker sees them as versions of herself and that no matter what they do, where they go, the oppressions of patriarchy follows them through religion or race.

There are so many of me. I have met them, meet them every day, recognise their shadows on the streets. I know their past and future in cautious way they place their feet. I can see behind their veils, and before they speak I know their tongues, thick with the burr of Birmingham or Leeds. (Dharker 1997, 19)

They slinked out of their homes ___

. . . Tell me what you did when the new moon sliced you out of purdah, your body shimmering through the lies. (Dharker 1997, 19)

___ and met, one way or other, the same fate.

Saleema of the swan neck and tragic eyes, knew from films that the heroine was always pure,

‗Untouched, nevertheless‘, (20) Saleema ‗pours‘ herself into

white hands (the mad old artist with the pigeon chest) and marveled at her own strange wickedness. (Dharker 1997, 20)

Saleema is then

married back home, as good girls do, in a flurry of red the cousin – hers or mine, I cannot know – had annual babies, then rebelled at last.

At last, a sign, behind the veil, of life; 283

found another man, became another wife, and sank into the mould of her mother‘s flesh and mind, begging approval from the rest.

Her neck is bowed as if she wears a hood. Eyes still tragic, when you meet her on the high street, and watchful as any creature that lifts its head and sniffs the air only to scent its own small trail of blood. (20)

Parts of this poem would be funny and witty but for the ‗trail of blood‘. In 1989 when

Purdah came out in India, Eunice de Souza‘s Fix (1979) had already taken shots at her own Goan Christian community, Mamta Kalia‘s poems of complaint against father and marriage had appeared in 1970 and ‗78. There are similarities here. The girls‘ rebellions in Purdah II end up in the same fate:

Naseem, you ran away and your mother burned with shame. Whatever we did, the trail was the same: the tear-stained mother, the gossip aunts looking for shoots to smother inside all our cracks. The table is laden and you are remembered among the dead. No going back. The prayer‘s said.

And there you are with your English boy who was going to set you free, trying to smile and be accepted, always on your knees. (20-1)

The poet sees them,

There you are, I can see you all now in the tenements up north. In or out of purdah. Tied, or bound.

Shaking your box to hear how freedom rattles… one coin, one sound. (21) 284

It is Imtiaz Dharker who first dealt with the situation of the immigrant woman caught in the strictures of her own community within, and racism outside. By 1989 when

Purdah appeared, Bangladesh born, Taslima Nasreen‘s writings, critiquing the position of women under fundamentalism were being discussed. Nasreen‘s second book (in Bengali) Nirbashito Bahire Ontore (Banished Without and Within), (1989) was out and creating ripples. Dharker was one of the first voices to speak of such matters in English. Soon after there appeared a slew of books in the West on this theme, such as Tehmina Durrani‘s My Feudal Lord (1991). Dharker‘s poetry highlights oppressions but as one critic has noted, they are ‗not in agitprop mode‘.

There are images of knife at the throat in relation to women‘s lives in poems such as ‗Sacrifice‘. In ‗Purdah II‘ Dharker says,

You remember the sun pouring out of Maulvi‘s hands. It was to save the child the lamb was sacrificed; to save the man, the scourge and stones. God was justice. Justice could be dread. But woman. Woman, you have learnt that when God comes you hide your head. (19)

And outside on the street in Imtiaz‘s Glasgow and elsewhere in the West, the women in purdah feel odd, as expressed in the poem ‗Pariah‘, the first of four poems in Section 2 of the collection Purdah, titled ‗The Haunted House‘.

It‘s not that they despise me, rather that what they see is inconvenient. I make an untidy shape on their street, a scribble leaked out of a colonial notebook, somehow indiscreet. (Dharker 1997, 27)

285

She feels their looks like whiplash and when she comes home and performs the ritual ablutions before prayer, when she flicks the ritual water over the shoulder, she feels again a whiplash, this time it is the whiplash of her own community‘s oppressive strictures for women. But this double whiplash has a new consequence,

There it is the whiplash of a familiar pain, and from my back the surge of wings. (27-8) ‗Going Home‘, is the last of the four poems in Section 2; it offers a series of vignettes, the poet as a girl of twelve, travelling on a crowded bus ‗back home‘ with goats and people, or watching a film from ‗home‘ where ‗she was the heroine‘ in ‗bright fields of maize‘, and

a broad singing man who flirts with her through the dingy town. (35)

In another vignette the people in the houses on the hill look down on the tenements below and fume,

They‘ll come no good, daughters higher- educated, mixing with ―belaiti‖ boys. They‘ll regret it. And the poet with de Souza like wit says, Yes, they will. Their heads come rolling down the hill. (35)

Another vignette, of a relationship, expresses in short lines, the destiny of such encounters:

Making love. Going home. Both start with open arms and a festival spills out. Your name is scattered, shattered blindness blinds you winding round the black holes of your eyes. fatelines crack open till the sky looks through. Why did you leave? 286

Why did you come back? You try to fill the crevices with smiles. Get down on your knees. There must be some tenderness in the splinters of a violent act. (35)

If this is a return to the (white) lover, on your knees, the last vignette shows the prodigal daughter‘s return home:

The house lit up. The door thrown open. Your dead mother waiting at the top of the stairs. I‘ve caged myself inside a stranger‘s head. (35-6)

The last line could mean the lover who has been found to be a stranger, or the mother who has now turned into a stranger. But now she knows,

But if you were to open wide the door, I would not go. Lovers and forsaken fathers know the flood will well in them, find the sun, and dry to simple stone. (36)

The returning daughter knows that return is impossible,

So even when I‘ve tried the world and found it wanting tell me how can I come home? (36)

Much like the single woman of Tara Patel‘s book, much like the migrant, return is not possible to the parental home.

Section III of Purdah collection titled, ‗The Child Sings‘ represents some of the things that Imtiaz Dharker encountered as a documentary film maker in Bombay and elsewhere. Her official website http://imtiazdharker.com states that in 1980 she

‗Started SOLO, a company for the production, scripting and direction of video films‘, and has produced till date ‗over 300 films and audio-visuals including films on ‗street children‘, ‗children in need of special care‘, ‗leprosy case study‘, ‗reproductive 287

health‘, ‗cancer treatment‘, ‗prevention of disability‘, and much more. Some of these experiences are reflected in Purdah in poems such as ‗Another Woman‘ about a woman in a slum, who had been in the market buying the greenest methi leaves and cooking it at the stove with care, hunched up against rebukes and taunts for dowry, and then her husband comes in and splashes her with kerosene and she becomes,

Another torch blazing in the dark. Another woman. We shield our faces from the heat. (Dharker 1997, 46-47)

‗Zarina‘s Mother‘ shows a poor uneducated woman, tied down to chores with four children and a drunk husband and a ‗clawing hunger tearing inside you‘. Zarina‘s mother tells what the doctor has said,

Not tomorrow, not next week, but one day ten years from now the disease will flare inside her. (42)

Dharker describes the sounds in the slum house, the radio playing, and how,

All this overlays the sound of water spilled, sudden squealing children bathing in the sun.

In this place, everything speaks. The difficulty is, having spoken, to be understood. She lifts her hand to make leper‘s claw. Zarina looks curiously, then turns away to watch the other chidren at play. Six years old. Still raw, but on the way to meet her future: ten years or more,

Not today. (42-3) 288

There are no embellishments, simply bald statements of fact, much as the pictures in a documentary film, but the stark situation, the irony hits home. ‗Blessing‘, in the same section, begins:

The skin cracks like a pod. There never is enough water. Imagine the drip of it, the small splash, echo in a tin mug the voice of a kindly god. (42-3)

She describes the ecstasy of, ‗every man woman and child for streets around‘ when

a sudden rush of fortune. The municipal pipe bursts, silver crashes to the ground and the flow has found a roar of tongues. From the huts. (45) There is the documentary film maker‘s eye for the factual but also a coming together of poetry and filmography with visual and audio details __

naked children screaming in the liquid sun, their highlights polished to perfection, flashing light. as the blessing sings over their small bones. (45)

In these poems there is the observer‘s gaze, unlike the poems about women in the

Purdah Section where she too, is one of the women she describes. She states this in her compressed way through the title ‗Another Woman‘ for the woman burnt to death for dowry.

The last poem ‗Choice‘ in this third section, ‗The Child Sings‘, is clearly autobiographical. Imtiaz Dharker came over to Britain from Pakistan with her parents as a small child, grew up in Glasgow attending a Calvinist school. She belonged to the

Muslim community of Glasgow and married at an early age an Indian Hindu, Anil

Dharker, and came to live in India. Her daughter Ayesha was born in 1978 in 289

Bombay. At the time Purdah came out Ayesha would be eleven. Dharker moved back to Britain where she later married the poet Simon Powell in 2007. ‗Choice‘ is also one of the poems on Imtiaz Dharker‘s website. It is unusual as it begins like an argument, almost a defense of her own life choices as a woman and as a mother:

I may raise my child in this man‘s house or that man‘s love, warm her on this one‘s smile, wean her to that one‘s wit, praise or blame at a chosen moment, in a considered way, say yes or no, true, false, tomorrow not today. . . Finally, who will she be when the choices are made, when the choosers are dead, and of the men I love, the teeth are left chattering with me underground? just the sum of me and this or that other? Who can she be but, helplessly, herself ? (Dharker 1997, 45)

And then in the next section of the poem she tells her infant child how,

Some day your head won‘t find my lap so easily. Trust is a habit you‘ll soon break. (49)

There is a candid expression of a primal feeling, an ‗unspeakable‘ feeling,

Once, stroking a kitten‘s head through a haze of fur, I was afraid of my own hand big and strong and quivering with the urge to crush. Here, in the neck‘s strong curve, the cradling arm, love leers close to violence. (Dharker 1997, 49)

There is the reassurance too,

Home is this space in my lap, till the body reforms, tissues stretch, flesh turns firm. your kitten-bones will harden, grow away from me, till you and I are sure we are both safe. (Dharker 1997, 50)

290

Dharker‘s voice does not have the clichéd sentimentality associated with mother-child love in Indian culture, but an honest clear statement of the fact that the mother is a person too. This comes from her British upbringing as well as her Islamic background where it is normative for women to divorce, move on, and remarry much like men. It is also a feminist assertion, to reclaim one‘s body, one‘s life after childbirth, and in doing so also set the child free.

But then, no word is the last word on the filial bond. The third and last section of the poem ‗Blessing‘ is addressed to the poet‘s own mother, and suggests that despite the choices of freedom that she, the daughter exercised, she has ended up like her mother:

I spent years hiding from your face, … dreaming of you, the watchdogs of virtue and obedience crouched on my chest. ‗Shake them off,‘ I told myself, and did. Wallowed in small perversities, celebrated as they came of age, matured to sins. (Dharker 1997, 50)

Here is the daughter‘s rebellion just as it is in de Souza, Mamta Kalia, Tara Patel and

Kamala Das. But like the single woman in Tara Patel‘s poem, Imtiaz too recognizes the outcome of rebellious choice:

I call this freedom now, watch the word cavort luxuriously, strut my independence across whole continents of sheets. But turning from the grasp of arms, the rasp of breath, to look through darkened windows at the night, Mother, I find you staring back at me. When did my body agree to wear your face? (Dharker 1997, 50)

The woman, reverting to the parent it has left behind, is found in A K Ramanujan‘s poem ‗Self Portrait‘ where he writes,

I resemble everyone 291

but myself, and sometimes see in shop-windows despite the well-known laws of optics, the portrait of a stranger, date unknown, often signed in a corner by my father. (Ramanujan 23)

Identity thus remains genetic, and in Dharker‘s poem, recognition of genetic identity comes with parenthood.

The fourth and last section in Purdah is titled ‗Borderlines‘ and deals with larger questions of history, nation, violence and art. In the poem ‗Battle-Line‘

Dharker addresses the India-Pakistan relationship through the metaphor of ‗distrustful lovers‘.

These two countries lie

hunched against each other, distrustful lovers who have fought bitterly and turned their backs; but in sleep, drifted slowly in, moulding themselves around the cracks to fit together, whole again; at peace. Forgetful of hostilities until, in the quiet dawn, the next attack. (Dharker 1997, 55)

The poem also suggests the tensions that may have riven Imtiaz‘s marriage with her

Indian Hindu husband :

It‘s the same with lovers, after the battle-lines are drawn: combatants thrown into something they have not had time to understand. And in the end, just a reflex turning away, when there is nothing, really, 292

left to say;

when the body becomes a territory shifting across uneasy sheets;

when you retreat behind the borderline of skin.

Turning, turning, barbed wire sinking in. (Dharker 1997, 55)

And then the calm sorrow of the parting,

Having come home, all you can do is leave.

Spaces become too small. Doors and windows begin to hold your breath. Floors shift underfoot, you bruise yourself against a sudden wall. (Dharker 1997, 55)

Because, leaving home, you call yourself free.

Because, behind you, barbed wire grows where you once had planted a tree. (Dharker 1997, 58)

The images could well be applied to those who had to leave their homes during the

Partition. Dharker‘s personal trajectory takes her through Pakistan, Britain, India and back to Britain. The poem compresses personal and subcontinental history in a way that touches countless personal histories of political evacuation of populations across the globe. And in her case and that of irreconcilable lovers, no return is possible as stated in ‗No Man‘s Land‘: ‗We are countries out of reach‘. The ‗Borderlines‘ section of ‗Purdah‘ looks at enmity , hostility, shootings, hangings in ways that extend the allusions beyond personal history, beyond even subcontinental history. And hostility 293 is not always located in wars between nations, it lurks within the human being. In

‗The Mask‘ she writes,

Within each one of us, the scaled beast lurks… Power is not always fanged, smeared with the blood of the lamb. More often it wears a simpering mask. More often it looks like us. (Dharker 1997, 66)

The last poem in Purdah , ‗The Rope‘ is bleak, as it converges the image of the hanged man swinging from a rope and memories of a rope creaking to a grandmother‘s lullabies. The poem concludes with a statement of our complicity,

Be still, and wait. You are the cause, the victim and the one witness: these are tomorrow‘s cradles rocking‘. (Dharker 1997, 69-70)

In his review of Postcards from God, Ranjit Hoskote comments :

In Purdah she memorialises the betweenness of a traveller between cultures, exploring the dilemmas of negotiation among countries, lovers, children. Dharker‘s next collection, Postcards from God depicts religious strife in the contemporary world. It is a long way from the poems on religion and worship, the mesmerizing power of religious leaders on young female worshippers, from the strangeness of being a Muslim woman in Britain, in her Purdah volume.44

In the poem ‗Postcards from god 1‘, god says,

Yes, I do feel like a visitor, a tourist in this world that I once made. I rarely talk, except to ask the way, distrusting my interpreters, tired out by the babble of what they do not say … Here, in this strange place, in a disjointed time, I am nothing but a space/that sometimes has to fill. Images invade me. (Dharker 1997, 75)

294

After the ‗Purdah‘ poems of the first collection, that had shown the lives of immigrant women from Pakistan in the U.K., Postcards from God exposes the plight of the wretched of the slums of Bombay. As Hoskote observes,

An anguished god surveys a world stricken by fundamentalism in these powerful poems by a writer whose cultural experience spans three countries: Pakistan, the country of her birth, and Britain and India, her countries of adoption. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief…. If the poems collected in Purdah are windows shuttered upon a private world, those gathered into Postcards from god are doorways leading out into the lanes and shanties where strangers huddle, bereft of the tender grace of attention. The poems are amplified by powerful black and white drawings by the author. The line is Imtiaz Dharker's sole weapon in a zone of assault which stretches over the Indian subcontinent's bloody history, the shifting dynamics of personal relationships and the torment of an individual caught between two cultures, divergent world-views. 45

There are poems such as ‗Face‘ that makes god say,

In the most unexpected places my own face looms up at me . (Dharker 1997, 75)

In processions an elephant face, in mosques ‗blazoned calligraphy‘, in dashboards of taxis, in shops,

squashed between detergent and boiled sweets, …garlanded with flowers. My captive eyes smile out at me. (Dharker 1997, 105)

In the section ‗Naming the Angels‘, the poet asks Adam what happened when he began naming the angels, and suggests how each angel after being named by Adam,

bowed, …under the great load of this new knowledge, the real beginning of the road from flight to fall. All of them stung into separateness. Alone, within the pride of being named __ the first sin. (127) 295

There are several poems that use the figure of Adam as reference point ___ Adam the archetypal man, or human. ‗Namesake‘ is about a boy named Adam, in Dharavi, who goes to work with his mother, at a hotel, chopping vegetables, watching the pots on the stove until late evening when sleepily he waits while behind a wall his mother

sells herself as often as she can before they have to hurry home. (Dharker 1997, 128)

The poet says how this child

never turns to look at you. He has no memory of the Garden, paradise water or the Tree. But if he did Adam, he would not think to blame you or even me for the wrath that has been visited, inexplicably, on him. (Dharker 1997, 128)

Imtiaz Dharker interrogates the justice of divine punishment in the story of the Fall:

Reflected in sheets of water at his back stand avenging angels he will never see. (Dharker 1997, 128)

‗Adam‘s Daughter‘ describes a girl child in a slum, tearing at a piece of bread, surveying the visitor (the poet visiting for a project about nutrition or health perhaps).

At three years old she has seen enough to live in dread. Hands give and often take away. There is no pattern to it. . . . The child waits, to see what my next move will be. Out of her eyes I see myself, 296

crow black, vast, blocking out the sun. (Dharker 1997, 130)

Then there is ‗Adam from New Zealand‘ a journalist, twenty-six eager to see the real

India in Dharavi, whom the poet refuses to take on a guided tour and serve up the child Adam or Zarina‘s mother for their souls to be eaten by the cameras. She tells this visiting Adam, ‗Adam your namesake lives in Dharavi‘. (131-2) In ‗Your Price‘ she asks

Deliver our children out of the future That you have made for them … What‘s your price, lord? (Dharker 1997, 136)

In the last section of Postcards from God, titled ‗Bombay‘, several of the poems are written from experiences of violence the poet experienced or lived amidst in India in the ‗90s. There are poems bearing place name and year for titles. The last poem is called ‗Minority‘ and spells out the author‘s unique history, born in U.K. to parents who were newly arrived immigrants from Pakistan.

I was born a foreigner. I carried on from there to become a foreigner everywhere I went, even in the place planted with my relatives…

All kinds of places and groups of people who have an admirable history would, almost certainly, distance themselves from me.

I don‘t fit, like a clumsily-translated poem. (Dharker 1997, 157) She says how her writing is like a reaction to a medical condition,

And so I scratch, scratch through the night, at this growing scab on black on white. Everyone has the right to infiltrate a piece of paper. A page doesn‘t fight back. 297

And, who knows, these lines may scratch their way into your head – through all the chatter of community, family, clattering spoons, children being fed – immigrate into your bed, squat in your home, and in a corner, eat your bread,

until, one day, you meet the stranger sidling down your street, realise you know the face simplified to bone, look into its outcast eyes and recognise it as your own. (Dharker 1997, 159-60)

In Postcards from God, the poet wants her poetry to make people recognize themselves in her, in the outcast, the stranger. Up until these two collections it is the self that the poet sees as the person kept outside, even though the poems about

Dharavi show the wretched lot of the poor.

Dharker‘s next volume, I Speak for the Devil (2003) deals more with women and the ‗devil‘ that speaks from their mouths. The publisher‘s note says,

The title-sequence speaks for the devil in acknowledging that in many societies women are respected, or listened to, only when they are carrying someone else inside their bodies – a child; a devil. For some, to be "possessed" is to be set free‘, 46

The book is dedicated by the poet to

For all the ones who stood up and spoke out. For the ones who are still struggling to find their feet and their voices. For the ones who have nothing left to be afraid of. For all the others who haven‘t yet begun. For you, 298

in hope..

I Speak for The Devil, takes forward the speaking out voice in Purdah and Postcards

From God. The first section, ‗They‘ll say, ―She must be from another country‖, begins with a report about a woman in Lahore in the last year of the 20th century‘ who

‗was shot by her family in her lawyer‘s office‘, because she had asked for a divorce.

‗The whole Pakistan Senate refused to condemn the act. They called it ‗honour killing‘. (3)

In Dharker‘s poem ‗Honour Killing‘ in I Speak for The Devil the speaker says:

At last I‘m taking off this coat, this black coat of a country that I swore for years was mine,

… I‘m taking off this veil, this black veil of a faith that made me faithless to myself, that tied my mouth, ….

I‘m taking off these silks, these lacy things that feed dictator dreams, the mangalsutra and the rings rattling in a tin cup of needs that beggared me.

I‘m taking off this skin, and then the face, the flesh, the womb.

Let‘s see what I am in here when I squeeze past the easy cage of bone.

Let‘s see what I am out here, making, crafting, plotting at my new geography. (5)

299

The poem cuts across all denominations through the references to the veil and mangalsutra and is not religion or culture specific. The next poem ‗The Order‘ sounds like the utterance of a dead woman and indicates violence, ‗broken mirror‘ ‗matted fur‘ ‗carcass lying on the boat‘. The speaker refers to herself as animal, ‗I‘m wandering on all fours between rows of cars‘. ‗I remember seeing this with my enemy‘s eyes‘, she says. Towards the end she says,

…I‘ll go. I must have stayed too long. I‘ve begun to look like you. Is that my shoe floating on the water?(6)

In the poem ‗Here‘ we see an indication of some sort of evacuation of territory, leaving the home, doors ajar because ‗you have told all your secrets and there is nothing left to steal‘. The last two stanzas show how,

In another place, people begin to shout. The top comes off my head. All light flies out. Whether I stand on this side of the borderline, or that, the colour keeps sliding off my face. (8)

The next poem ‗There‘ shows the woman revisiting the home she had left, where the master of house had filled the house with sofas, children servants but kept the walls bare.

When you came home, we crept around you quietly, massaged your feet. I left one day, You never wrote. (9)

300

When she returns after twenty years she finds ‗the children and the sofa sets had gone‘ and he ‗sat there with the television on; / a fax machine, a phone‘, but the walls were now hung with ‗every childish line I had ever drawn‘, and adds that ,

‗Now it doesn‘t matter when I speak./ It will always be too late‘. ‗The Orders‘ and

‗Stitched‘ were first published in Stand Volume 1(3), September 1999. In ‗Stitched‘ the poet says that she is a patchwork stitched from various parts and people disapprove:

Someone stitched on my head and hands but they used some foreign stuff that pointed out the parts where I‘d been mended. And so my mouth spoke Punjabi while my brain heard Scots. My ears followed German and my tongue did French. It seems they were about to put me out in a garbage bag, I looked so odd. But I survived, … Maybe it‘s time to do dangerous somersaults, to jump and dance and run. Maybe it‘s time to come again undone. (Dharker 2003, 11)

This defiant playfulness is a new tone in Dharker‘s poetry and recalls the tone of defiance and wit in Eunice de Souza‘s poem ‗Eunice‘ from the 1988 volume Women in Dutch Painting:

Eunice is writing bad words sister she‘s sewing up her head for the third time sister the limbs keep flopping the sawdust keeps popping out of the gaps/ sister. (A Necklace of Skulls, 53)

In fact Charmayne D‘Souza‘s A Spelling Guide to Woman (1970) has poems of similar tone. Some of Dharker‘s poems now use a different language:

It‘s time to face up to this. 301

The century was a bitch. Thank god it‘s dead and gone … Good riddance to bad rubbish I say. I was ready to junk it all anyway, throw it in a ditch, the hypocrites, the prudes running our lives with their holier-than-thou prissy attitudes, the bigots with their offended sensibilities, the bastards who‘ll put on any party shoe that fits. Who needs this shit? ( Dharker 2003, 23)

The poem is ‗Announcing the Arrival…,‘ and dedicated to Ayesha, her daughter. In a research paper titled, ‗Transmediality in the Work of Imtiaz Dharker: Gendered

Spaces in Poetry and Visual Art‘, Sonja Lehmann notes that Dharker

can already almost see, almost grasp a utopian future characterized by girls like her daughter… by whom the new epoch is ―silvered‖. …In her vision, the power to transform lies in the hands of the next generation of girls like Ayesha. If they want it to, ―[t]he world shifts / with a lift of your hair‖ so that everything becomes possible. (Lehmann 10-11) I Speak for the Devil celebrates a freedom of being able to say or do things that women ‗normally‘ would not. In the third section titled ‗I Speak for the Devil‘,

Dharker writes about many such women, in Pakistan and in Scotland who began to speak in ‗voices‘ that are either considered clairvoyant or crazy. Some ended up being sought after for predictions, like Auntie in ‗The djinn in Auntie‘. The poem,

‗All of Us‘ lists many such women from Muslim, Hindu and Christian communities, who one fine day begin to speak strangely or do strange things. Dharker writes,

This is a narrow road, but we are on it, more of us every day, shouting out loud to one another as if we‘d met before, somewhere on the way. They can say we‘re out of control. They can say we‘ve gone 302

to the devil. We are able to hear each other now, laughing, screaming singing with one mouth. (52-3)

The phrase ‗all of us‘ picks up from a previous poem in the same volume, ‗They‘ll say, ―She must be from another country‖, where the poet writes,

Maybe there‘s a country where all of us live, all of us freaks who aren‘t able to give our loyalty to fat old fools, the crooks and thugs who wear the uniform that gives them the right to wave a flag, puff out their chests, put their feet on our necks, and break their own rules. (31)

In an interview with Eunice de Souza published in Talking Poems (1999) before I Speak for The Devil came out later in the same year, de Souza asks Dharker,

‗Do you feel that Third World poets should necessarily be concerned about politics?‘

Dharker replies,

―All of life is political. Politics extends into everything. Every act is political. We in the Third World are faced with this on a day-to-day basis, which is one of the reasons why I‘d rather write here than elsewhere‖. (Talking Poems 116)

There are echoes in some of Dharker‘s poems of her contemporary Indian women poets. For instance, the poem, ‗Not a Muslim Burial‘ where she asks that she be burnt and not cremated and her words be burnt too, and the ashes not scattered but simply put on train ‗travelling between‘, and that,

On the journey I will need no name, no nationality. Let them label the remains ‗Lost Property‘. (Dharker 2003, 29)

303

_____ resonates with Kamala Das‘s poem ‗A Request‘, in The Descendants, (1967) a poem where Kamala Das writes,

When I die Do not throw the meat and bones away But pile them up And Let them tell By their smell What life was worth On this earth What love was worth In the end. (54)

By Imtiaz Dharker‘s next book The Terrorist at My Table (2007) many things have happened in the world to change the world‘s perceptions of strangers and even of known persons. Terror attacks have left a trail of constant fear and doubt. Dharker goes under the skin of this new climate fear and distrust. The publisher‘s note to the book says:

The Terrorist at My Table asks crucial questions about how we live now –

working, travelling, eating, listening to the news, preparing for attack. What

do any of us know about the person who shares this street, this house, this

table, this body? When life is in the hands of a fellow-traveller, a neighbour, a

lover, son or daughter, how does the world shift and reform itself around our

doubt, our belief?

Imtiaz Dharker‘s poems and pictures hurtle through a world that changes even

as we pass. This is life seen through distorting screens – a windscreen, a TV

screen, newsprint, mirror, water, breath, heat haze, smokescreen.

Her book grows, layer by layer, through three sequences: The Terrorist at My

Table, The Habit of Departure and Worldwide Rickshaw Ride. Each cuts a

different slice through the terrain of what we think of as normal. But through 304

all the uncertainties and concealments, her poems unveil the delicate skin of

love, trust and sudden recognition.47

The title of the book hints at the convergence of two worlds __ the world implied by the label ‗terrorist‘ and the world of the ‗table‘, home, food, familiarity, hospitality. And this time, despite the new climate of fear and doubt, there are poems that celebrate life within the family. There are happy poems such as ‗Campsie Fells‘ recalling a picnic with the extended Pakistani family in Scotland. There are also happy poems about life in India, on the streets, on a rickshaw. The title poem begins with the poet writing, neatly ordering her lines as she would chop onions. The analogy of onion chopping brings together the impulse to write, to start the cooking of a dish, the imposition of a kind of order, but soon moves into the use of knives, cutting up lands and more. The opening lines show how worlds converge, through the news, and through global politics:

I slice sentences to turn them into onions. On this chopping board, they seem more organised, as if with a little effort I could begin to understand their shape. At my back, the news is the same as usual. A train blown up, hostages taken. Outside, in Pollokshields, the rain.

She moves through her home from room to room,

When things are in their place, they look less difficult.

She surveys this orderly world that she has created,

Here is the food. I put it on the table. The tablecloth is fine cutwork, sent from home. Beneath it, Gaza is a spreading watermark. 305

The simple word ‗watermark‘ conveys the insignia of ownership written into the Gaza. With this the speaker brings together the two worlds __ tranquil

Pollokshields in Glasgow where she lives, and conflict torn Gaza. And now the convergence of the image of onion chopping indicates the chopping of truth:

Here are the facts, fine as onion rings. The same ones can come chopped or sliced. (22)

The ‗facts‘ may be presented in different ways, and then there is the image of evacuation, fleeing through the mention of common objects of daily life,

Shoes, kitchens, onions can be left behind, but at a price. Knowledge is something you can choose to give away, but giving and taking leave a stain. (22)

The allusion is obviously to the stain of blood. In the next stanza she asks,

Who gave the gift of Palestine? (22) . . . Your generosity turns my hands to knives, the tablecloth to fire. (23)

Is it the speaker speaking of kitchen knives, is it the terrorist who is speaking of killings, reprisals, fires. Have their hands really turned into knives, or, have those who generously gave away Palestine now are paranoid that her hands have turned into knives ? It could mean either, or all of these things. The poem concludes with,

Outside, on the face of Jerusalem, I feel the rain, (23)

resonating with the earlier line, ‗Outside, in Pollokshields, the rain‘. Jerusalem and

Pollokshields thus become closely linked. Alan Ross comments in London Magazine, 306

Hers is a strong, concerned, economical poetry, in which political activity, homesickness, urban violence, religious anomalies, are raised in an unobtrusive domestic setting, all the more effectively for their coolness of treatment. 48

The terrorist at my table thus shows how events far away are linked to her own life, and how the terrorist at her table is the self. In the next poem ‗The Right Word‘ a series of short stanzas asks if ‗terrorist‘ is the right description.

Outside the door, lurking in the shadows, is a terrorist. Is that the wrong description? (25) She tries out alternate words __ ‗freedom-fighter‘, ‗hostile militant‘, guerrilla warrior‘,

‗martyr‘, and then she says,

Just outside the door, lost in shadows, is a child who looks like mine. Then she says, One word for you. Outside my door his hand too steady, his eyes too hard is a boy who looks like your son, too. (25)

The last two stanzas then deconstruct the ‗terrorist‘:

I open the door. Come in, I say. Come in and eat with us. The child steps in and carefully, at my door, takes off his shoes. (26)

Dharker sketches with minimal description, with just statement of facts how things take on double meanings in a scenario of apprehension and suspicion, how it is difficult to say who is who, or who is what. ‗Platform‘ is a poem that on the surface is only about leaving and staying.

On the platform opposite 307

three men and one woman are reading newspapers, six people are speaking into phones, or listening. One is sitting on a tin case marked ‗fragile‘. A boy yawns, then looks at the girl weaving green boots. The board shuffles through its pack of numbers. A poster offers Escape Routes Trains come and go. Now only four on phones. Where did that man go, carrying his fragile cargo? Easy to lose count. Some leave in time. Some stay. (27)

This could be a painted scene. It could be just an innocuous scene. Yet read in a climate of paranoid checks and searches, of closed circuit cameras, the scene could be also read as vigilant observation. The last line maintains the ambivalence, some leave in time, could be ‗escaping‘, or just punctuality. ‗One‘, ‗six‘, ‗four‘ , ‗some‘ ‗three men and one woman‘, suggests a dispassionate observer, a camera, the reference by numbers denote surveillance.

The poem, ‗Who made me?‘ uttered as a series of questions seems to echo Blake‘s poem, ‗Little Lamb, who made thee?‘ Here the terrorist asks,

Who put a gun in my hand and took away my land? Who made me? Who took my mouth and put it behind a mask of democracy, who set me free?... Who told me I should follow them? Who led me? ... Whose hand should I bite? Who made me? (34)

Dharker‘s poems become suggestive and multi-layered, partly because she does not provide extensive notes and explanations. In an interview, asked about the absence on 308

‗notes‘ to the poems, she replied that it was up to the reader to get into the poem. In a poem titled ‗Firm‘, a speaker describes his location on the thirteenth floor of a very tall building. He says,

I feel the strength and power of this place, the shafts of steel soaring like angel‘s wings to lift me up. … No gusts of wind can shake it. My feet are firmly planted here. Secure. The last lines provide the context, I am on the thirteenth floor, fifteen windows from the left. Can you see me from up there, from that plane? (35)

9/11 is the context of some such poems but no mention is made of it through specific date or location.

‗These are the times we live in‘ in The Terrorist at My Table is three separate poems with the same title followed by I, II, and III. The speaker expresses the experience of powerful scrutiny at airports, the erasure of identities, the suspicions, and the ransacking of personal and private. In the poem ‗These are the times we live in III‘ the speaker says,

They got an eraser as big as a house and they began to use it to delete your life, the names of your lanes and roads and streets, your stories and your histories, your lullabies … They took your books and broke the backs cracked their spines, the margins gone, all the lines jumbled together, pages torn. (49)

There is a hint of writing under scrutiny, writing in fear,

Your words have packed their bags and gone. New ones have crawled 309

back all crumpled and small like jailbirds into cages, to fit the times we live in. (49) The third sequence of poems is titled ‗Lascar Johnnie 1930‘, and consists of six poems. The section is introduced with a note saying: ‗In the 1930s, twenty percent of Britain‘s maritime labour force was made up of Indian seamen, called lascars.

Many stayed on at ports like Glasgow, some as itinerant salesmen, peddling their wares in remote parts of Scotland‘. The first poem in this section, titled ‗Lascar‘ says:

I am invisible, in a ship manned by invisible men, hands without names. The captain does not see us, … The captain chooses not to hear our songs, or know our names. Allahuddin, Mohammed, Mubarak, Bismillah. Our names are prayers. Someone must be saying them tonight in the other country like a conversation, as if we were there. (57)

Dharker gives voice to their sense of wonder at the quality of light in

Glasgow, their memories of home, (‗Glasgow, Shore Leave‘) to how peddling his wares to an old woman he answers that his name is Johnnie, to make it easy for her to say, ( ‗Johnnie‘) and how he remembers his wife who called him Jaan.

Doorway. On the step, my wares laid out, everything I have. my life laid bare. Doorstep. A woman doubtfully fingers cloth, and shakes her head Too dear, Johnnie. Doorway. Standing there, my wife, jasmine in her hair, called me Jaan, her life. …You know how it is Someone says your name . Jaan. John. Jaanu. Johnnie. 310

Your head turns, too quickly. Your eyes expect another doorway another kind of light. (61)

This section gives the reader a history, one of several histories, of subcontinental Muslim migrants in Scotland.

The next sequence is called ‗Remember Andalus‘. The words are printed as an epigraph to the section, and ascribed to Osama Bin Laden. This is followed by another epigraph, a line from Edward Said, ‗Culture is a form of memory against effacement‘. In her essay, ‗Writing the Nations: Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish

Literature‘, in The History of British Women's Writing, 1970-Present,Volume Ten,

(2015) edited by Mary Eagleton and Emma Parker, Hywel Dix notes that,

Andalusia is central to Dharker because it represents a place and time when European and Moorish cultures met. In her poetic imagination the meaning of the meeting is not fixed in time; it has constantly to be remade…. Her poem, ‗The Last Sigh‘ alludes to Salman Rushdie‘s The Moor‟s Last Sigh (1995) and gives a voice to the imagined Moor whose portrait is at the heart of Rushdie‘s novel. Like Rushdie, Dharker is interested in questioning the notion of racially ‗pure‘ cultural origins and. Therefore throughout the sequence shows a shift from an ethnically pure view of cultures to one based on elective affinity. The whole of ‗Remember Andalus‘ presents nationality as a question of consciously chosen affiliation, where this affiliation is often addressed by the different roles played by women. Dharker‘s work generates a strong sense of her commitment to transnational feminism, on the one hand, and to national identity as elective affinity on the other. This idea of active choice contrast sharply with the idea of fortune as always laid down by destiny. Thus her recent collection, Leaving Fingerprints (2009) concludes with along sequence of poems about fortune tellers struggling to read the palm of a woman who has many different lives and fortunes to tell.(Dix 210)

In a note to this essay, Dix explains that ‗nationalism and nationalist will be used to refer to specific nationalisms of Wales, Scotland and to some extent Ireland‘ (Dix

211) Dharker is thus counted among Scottish poets and resonates with the Scottish,

Welsh and Irish psyche regarding questions of nationalism. The first poem of the 311

‗Remember Andalus‘ sequence titled ‗Alif, Anar‘ recalls the immigrant parents come home joyful one day, ‗laughing at the pleasure of squandering a shilling‘ on something ‗mysterious‘ in a ‗brown paper bag‘.

It was a whole idea of life concentrated into one thing, wrapped in tissue paper ...... the kind of gift the magi might bring, bought off a barrow, out of the bitter Glasgow rain. (65)

The father unwraps the tissue paper, and

….produced the prize that made the room rearrange itself, sit up.

‗Look , Anar!‘ He lifted it in his hand, strange fruit, shining. Back to Alif. The opening. (65)

It is obvious that the son Alif had never beheld this wonder fruit from his parent‘s homeland. The reference to the magi evokes the wise men of the east and as the poet says, ‗it was a whole idea of life/ concentrated in one thing‘. Dharker is able to evoke long histories, entire worlds through a single word or phrase. Placed within the

‗Remember Andalus‘ section it speaks of much more, the Arab Muslim history of

Spain, the import of fruits and fruit trees from Asia to Andalusia. The next poem,

‗How to Cut a Pomegranate‘ shows the father teaching the family about the ‗magic fruit‘ from which the

jewels of the world will tumble out …Each jewel contains a living seed …a whole universe‘. (66)

312

Tasting the pomegranate the poet finds it

tasted of gardens I had never seen, voluptuous with myrtle, lemon, jasmine, and alive with parrot‘s wings. The pomegranate reminded me that somewhere I had another home. (67)

In ‗Train to Granada‘ the poet travels ‗across endless plains‘ that ‗simmer‘ to Granada the heart of Andalusia, ‗I have crossed hours of rough landscape, the whole length of

Spain/ to reach this place‘. In her imagination the train becomes

. . . a cavalcade, thundering in to Andalus on Arabian horses, heading towards the hill where room by room they would carve out a quiet space. (67)

The poet imagines the artist of those times visualising the hills as a background for the ‗main event‘ which for them must have been ‗a fuller softer life‘. The poet‘s own search seems to merge with theirs,

Tired of wars and threats, looking for a safe haven, peace, a promise of rest, a hope of poetry. (67)

And describing the interiors of the Moorish buildings in ‗Inside‘, she notes how in simple plaster they created openings for light to pour in, for water to course in,

Song turned liquid, soil made sumptuous,

the secret, the jewel inside the fruit, (68) harking back to the two pomegranate poems. Dharker‘s imagination is visual and tied to her drawings. She imagines the women bathing in the Alhambra by moonlight in 313

‗Women bathing‘. ‗The Last Sigh‘ is for the emptiness that now reigns over a grand history. It concludes the first section titled ‗The terrorist at my table‘.

In 2007, Dharker married Simon Powell the poet. He had been suffering from cancer for many years then. He passed away in 2009. ‗Light‘, the first poem in ‗The

Habit of Departure‘ the second section of Terrorist at My Table.(2006) describes the moment when she receives the news that it would begin again,/ the daily studying of cells…‘ She remembers the bright lights and begins counting them, ‗as if it could change something‘. Her poems about Simon are powerful in their touching simplicity.

In the same section, the poem, ‗I need‘ lists a host of things beginning with her native food, the need to run to her father‘s land and to visit Crawford Market (in Bombay) and eat mangoes. It ends with ‗I need you to come back‘. Does this refer to her first husband Anil Dharker with whom she would have been able to share these needs, and from whom she was now divorced? ‗The Habit of Departure‘ section places the poem in such a context. ‗Sari‘ shows a street that has not yet come to its midday din and traffic, meanwhile a woman, a pavement dweller, thwacks her sari at the street side tap. The thinning fabric washed, ‗today she wears the orange, / washes green‘ she flings the sari out to dry over stones ‗like an accomplishment‘. Sunlight breaks through the fabric, ‗the city rolls its hip, / picks up its plastic bucket, / walks away‘.

(109) Perhaps it needs a person from outside the city, outside India, to describe the city with such deft detail. Similar detailing defines the poems in the last section,

‗Worldwide Rickshaw Ride‘. ‗Rickshaw Rider‘ describes her journey on a rickshaw through Bombay streets:

Phut phuting fast forward …. Bucking, doorless Bajaj autorickshaw, on three crazy wheels. 314

Tuk tuking along to a dhinchak song, And the horn, the horn. (125)

This marks a new phase in her poetry, where happy experiences are expressed in a gleeful burst of sound words. They express a ‗chutnification‘ of English. There are more rickshaw poems, celebrating the madness of the vehicle, and the madness of media mogul Rupert Murdoch who ‗captured one and carried it away to Hong Kong‘.

(‗Mogul Driver‘) There is reference to him in ‗The Driver‘s Domain‘: ‗He owns every shade of news‘, ‗A godlike footprint, Japan/ to the Middle East‘. (133)

Dharker‘s next book Leaving Fingerprints delves into geological traces of human lives. Describing Anarkali buried alive as punishment, to places in the U.K. the poems use the symbol of the fingerprint as a mark of presence. A review by Sarah

Crown in The Guardian states that,

it's easy to see the appeal of the fingerprint – with its suggestions of permanence, immutability, above all of ownership – to a woman in exile, unsure of her place in the world. It stands as a counterpoint to the nagging fear of effacement that lurks around the foundations of this collection and bubbles to the surface in poems such as "Her footprint vanishes", which begins "She disappeared without a trace, / they said. If there were footprints / on the sand, the sea got there / before anyone saw and wiped / her off the face of the earth. (Crown Web)

Dharker writes of the Bombay dabbawallahs whose tiffin boxes never go missing. But the poems in this collection do not have the immediacy of Dharker‘s other collections as she delves into the primordial past of humanity rather than the real present, contextualised with names, dates, place names as in the ‗Purdah‘ poems.

It is Over the Moon that shows Dharker in a recognizably happier mode. The book appeared some years after the death of Simon Powell to whom it is dedicated with the following lines,

for Simon Powell, not because you died but for how you live. 315

The epigraph on the next page quotes John Cage‘s acrostic:

the telegraM cAme. i Read it. death we expeCt but all wE get is Life. John Cage for Marcel Duchamp.

The book celebrates life. It is as though Dharker is no more an outsider. The opening poem‘s title, ‗Like That Only‘ reproduces Mumbai English or Indian English, and describes the poet‘s visit to a temple. Going up the steps she finds a hole in the toe of her sock and feels that,

You make a kind of offering of frailty, an opening for the world to show its grace and as you point, the watchers, children, street-dogs, bottom-scratchers become your family. You are a foreigner nowhere. (Dharker, Over the Moon. Kindle Location 106)

There follows an epiphanic understanding:

On imperfect feet, you go in to meet the gods, the open-armed, the many-eyed, the asymmetric, belly-shaking gods. (Location 113)

In ‗Number 106‘, (the name of a bus on route 106 in Mumbai) happiness beckons from a line of washing high above,

We are waving to you from up here, from the fourth floor to say don‘t worry about us, we are fine. We may be strung out, trousers vest blouse sari skirt on this washing line but the sun is being kind to us. Better here than down there where you are passing on the Number 106, crammed into a hot window frame with your loud loneliness. (Locations 157-163 )

316

The clothes sing, we are

waving to you, sending a sign that you would see if you were looking but you are not. (Location 163)

Bombay of her earlier volumes seems to have shed some of its misery and terror and there is a breath of fresh air now. Dharker recalls her late husband ‗Simon Rhys

Powell and Arun Kolatkar‘ hanging out ‗ At Britannia Café on Ballard Estate‘ savouring the fish known as Bombay Duck in the poem ‗Bombil, Bumla, Bummalo‘.

‗The First Sight of the Train‘ is addressed to a person who is dying (her Husband

Simon Powell) but who will not use grand narratives to describe it, only mechanic‘s vocabulary like ‗I‘m off for servicing‘, and who will instead wait intently watching for a train to appear out of a tunnel at what the poet describes as ‗luck-down seaside town‘.

Just as Dharker walks into the temple and finds grace in the crowd who become her family, her poem ‗Alan or David or John‘ shows the poet recalling how, as a girl of nine she fell in love with ‗an older man‘, actually a lad of fourteen living across her house and whose name ‗Alan or David or John‘, she did not know. In the street she never looked but

walked past casually, past Colin or Donald or Sam.

That began her writing of poems addressed to him. She found his replies in the poetry books

I brought home from the library, secret notes for me to come across in some borrowed golden treasury. My luve is like a red red rose they said, Come live with me and be my love, they said. 317

and they came unruly through the window of 13 Maxwell Drive to raid my heart. . . . with their sonnets and their couplets and their wee sleekit words, Rabbie and Will and John. (Locations 393-414)

She says how,

It didn‘t end there. The affair has gone on for years. Messages still appear for me to find in books, on screens, in the underground. I write back. The windmill heart still pumps and pumps against the dark. You asked how it began. It began, like everything, with love. I wrote and they came, they answered on behalf of the boy with no name, Alan or David or John‘. (Locations 414-420)

Dharker‘s poem is addressed to the Welsh poet, her husband Simon Powell and explains how her love for a boy in the neighbourhood when she was alittle girl, became a love for the poets. This is a rare example of text and real life, and love merging across a lifetime.

In ‗Song of love and loss‘, a review of Over the Moon in the Pakistani daily

Dawn, dated Aug 23, 2015 the reviewer, Muneeza Shamsie writes,

Dharker frequently asserts the bonds that she and her husband shared. ‗A hundred and one‘ is a rare and unusual love song: she creates images of him as he might have been in old age, wearing bedroom slippers and cardigans, smoking a pipe, eating burnt toast and jam and she leads up to the desperate plea, ―Sit on the sofa watching telly till you are at least one hundred and one or two or three. Be very old with me.‖

In ‗Stab‘ her grief and anger emerges in the staccato words:

Stab the page. Stab it in the heart. Find the word that is not a word. Find the word that is a blade. (Location 784) 318

Vigil‘ describes her dear one tied to a machine, and she watches over him until

its signals stop: I try to read its face the machine is blinking back its tears. (Location 807)

She goes on to write of his funeral in ‗After‘ and the sense of unreality. In ‗The

Other Side of Silence‘ images of grass, a broken eggshell and rain heighten the sadness and emptiness. In ‗Threshold‘ Dharker provides an intertextual engagement with the Laila-Majnu legend to portray her grief. (Shamsie Web)

There are happy poems too this time set in Bombay. Like the poem, ‗Number 106‘,

‗Mumbai? Kissmiss?‘ reminds one of Nissim Ezekiel‘s experiments with Indian

English. Dharker‘s poem reproduces the cadence in this fun poem,

Of course! Who is not knowing this, that after Happy Diwali comes Merry Kissmiss! Impossible to miss, when allovermumbai, Matharpacady to A to Z Market, rooftops are dancing in chorus and alloversky is fully full with paper stars. (Locations 536-540)

More circulated, more visible, more prolific than many of the modern women poets writing in India, diaspora poets such as Dharker nevertheless draw on some of the poetry written in India. Melanie Silgardo‘s poem ‗Bombay‘ from her first book

Three Poets has images and perspectives that are found in Dharker‘s bleaker poems about Bombay. The Bombay of Over the Moon however celebrates a Bombay that is reminiscent of Rushdie.

On the announcement of the Queen‘s gold medal for poetry, 2014, for

Dharker, Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate who selected the committee ―of 319 eminent men and women of letters‖ who selected Dharker‘, ‗ on the basis of her new collection, Over the Moon, and a lifetime‘s contribution to poetry, said,

Hers is a unique perspective and an essential voice in the diversity of English- language poetry. It is a moral force – a force for good and a force for change – that refuses to see the world as anything less personal than an extended village of near neighbours sharing in common struggles for how best to live. (Brown Web)

Melanie Silgardo’s poems in Three Poets– Melanie Silgardo , Santan

Rodrigues , Raul d‟ Gama Rose (1978) were begun ‗when she was an undergraduate‘, and according to Eunice de Souza ‗there is nothing of the apprentice in any of them.

The poems are deeply emotional but never mawkish‘. De Souza mentions this in her note on Silgardo and includes five poems from this collection in Nine Indian Women

Poets. Silgardo published another collection Skies of Design in 1985, after which she has not published any book, although her poems from these books continue to be anthologized. Five are included in Nine Indian Women Poets, making Silgardo along with Kamala Das and Mamta Kalia the poets with ten poems each in de Souza‘s anthology. This is a good thing in Silgardo‘s case, as both her books have long been out of print. In conversation with Eunice de Souza in the late ‗90s, Silgardo said , ‗I haven‘t written very much in the last fifteen years, I feel not so much blocked as blank. And that may have something to do with leaving India. Being here in England has led to a paralysis‘. (de Souza Talking Poems,127) Silgardo had said that many of her poems were about the fragility of youth and the inevitability of death.

The poem ‗1956-1976 A Poem‘ (from Three Poets) anthologised in Eunice de

Souza‘s Nine Indian Women Poets, (1997) says how

Twenty years ago they laid a snare.

I emerged headlong, 320

embarrassed, wet….

Ambitions gutter now. Afterthoughts glide by. My special icicles rifle through me. For diet I scratch out eyes …. The insane need to roll up the sky. Stand it up in some convenient place, hang a picture instead. A change from God's blank face. The end‘. (29)

Here is the same restlessness and rage that is found in Kamala Das, Mamta Kalia, and

Eunice de Souza. An anger at parents, God, and the world. There is also the admission of a mask of smiles to please the world, in the poem, ‗Child‘ from her first volume,

Three Poets and anthologized in Eunice de Souza‘s Nine Indian Women Poets,

(1997). The poet addresses a child who is shy and moves away:

you will not trust my adult face, my dangling arms. I talk too fluently, and smile too often and too long.

But slowly the child smiles at her. The poet says,

You smile now, the mask has taken off your frown, You have lost your little wisdom. Child, it won‘t be long before you laugh for the price of a song. (30-1)

‗The Earthworm‘s Story‘, also in Three Poets, describes a fraught existence __

I lost this bit of shine Scraping along the way. The crow pecked, The ant bit, 321

and the gravel sneered underbelly. The damp gone, the leaves fall heavy as plates, and clatter. Above the fly stalks the air. ‗It does not matter if that‘s your foot over me. (33)

In her doctoral thesis, ‗Feminism in Indian Christian Women Poets in Indian Writing in English‘, Marie Raj argues that submissiveness is enjoined upon women in the tenets of Christianity. She cites Silgardo‘s ‗The Earthworm‘s Story‘ as a metaphor for gendered behaviour. (Raj 170-71) This metaphor of the wounded creature appears in

Silgardo‘s second volume, Skies of Design as well. Silgardo‘s poem ‗Bird Broken‘ recalls Sarojini Naidu‘s poems ‗The Bird of Time‘ and ‗The Broken Wing‘. The bird‘s flight and song as metaphors for poetic voice derives from the Romantics in

Naidu, in whose poetry the poet‘s song has a mission for the motherland. In

Silgardo‘s poem published in the mid-1980s, flight and song plummet downwards.

The bird is wounded but solitary.

Bird broken on a flying wing you stumble on the air All night‘s spent in travelling a wound upon the wind. The strictures in your throat dissolve Rebuking all those private lies. No one knows about the fractures In the asphalt Only visible to those that fly. (Eunice de Souza1997: 36)

As she watches the bird‘s plummet to death, she tells it, ‗soon your voice will break‘.

Tight, light sheaf of feathers angling to the earth. To a resounding burial of air and dirt. (Eunice de Souza. 1997: 36)

322

The poem has many echoes of Ted Hughes‘ poem ‗Hawk in the Rain‘ in The Hawk in the Rain.(1957) Hughes‘s bird is specified by species, a hawk and endowed with loftier qualities, such as ‗angelic eye‘, but the fate is the same.

Coming from the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside down, Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him, The horizon traps him; the round angelic eye Smashed, mix his heart‘s blood with the mire of the land. (11)

Silgardo‘s bird has a different identity, it is wounded, and ‗The strictures in your throat dissolve / Rebuking all those private lies‘, suggest a life of oppression, now finally giving way. But the similarities between the two poems, and Sarojini

Naidu‘s bird poem suggest a confluence of literary precedents.

Silgardo‘s poem about her father shows a bleak childhood. If Mamta Kalia‘s

‗Tribute to Papa‘ (1970) had blamed the father for not being rich and daring, for being meek and proper, Silgardo is bitter about an irresponsible father who drinks‘. ‗For

Father on the Shelf‘ (from Three Poets,1978) declares,

Father, you will be proud to know you left something behind. The year you died I inherited a mind‘. (Eunice de Souza 1997: 31)

She recalls the childhood adulation replaced by disappointment over his drinking. She asks forgiveness for using ‗startling words‘ like ‗cad‘ and ‗bastard‘ in her fifteen year old mind, for saying them with her looks. She tells him now, ‗Wherever you are, will you / turn your index finger away?‘ Eunice de Souza writes how in Silgardo‘s poems,

‗Stressful states are precisely evoked‘. (Eunice de Souza 1997: 27)

Silgardo‘s poem to her father says,

I grant you divine power that it took to live your kind of life both villain and hero of the piece. Father, perhaps you lived too much. 323

And now I‘m writing with my life, The price of an inherited crutch‘. ((Eunice de Souza 1997: 32)

The image of the dead father recurs in ‗Sequel to Goan Death‘, in Three Poets. The poem has been reprinted in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, (2008) edited by Jeet Thayil. Published first in 1978, the poem pre-empts some of the Goan poems in Fix by Eunice de Souza published by Silgardo‘s Newground the next year in

1979. ‗Sequel to Goan Death‘ describes the funeral with control and understated irony.

All the people frozen in their places, gaping at the spaces that are mouth and eyes. I bend over to kiss the face, dead with last stubble, cold as the marble church across the road. This death is stiff and proper and self-contained. This death is a Christian Duty. Slipping into eternity with the final prayer. The coffin is long as a journey. The grave looks like a grave. Nothing special for father who hated graves. It saves an epitaph. (Thayil, Bloodaxe Book 281)

Unlike Kamala Das whose father-poems express love and anguish over the father‘s death, Silgardo‘s father-poems are more in alignment with the critical tone of Mamta

Kalia and Tara Patel. It is in her grandmother poem ‗Doris‘ that Silgardo takes a different route than the nostalgic, emotional tone of Kamala Das, and focuses on the other aspect of grandmother hood __ old age. ‗Doris‘ first appeared in Silgardo‘s second volume, Skies of Design (1985) and has been anthologized in Zide‘s In Their

Own Voice: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary Indian Women Poets (1993) and de Souza‘s Nine Women Poets (1997). It is an attempt to see the old lady as a person and not as grandmother. Silgardo writes,

No one calls you Doris anymore 324

…the firm earth trembles It opened and swallowed them one by one. The ones you went to school with, who later served their husbands as you did. Early mother, late widow‘. Your sons have long dispersed your daughters drag their feet . . . That early confidence and stern hold on our ears has broken into fear. (Eunice de Souza1997: 34-5)

Silgardo‘s poems, from the beginning, show her looking, not just at self, family, or her Goan community, but at larger life. ‗Stationary Stop‘ describes a station where nothing happens, ‗no train ever passed this way‘. There are a series of bleak images ending in the concluding lines:

Today there is hope. Old men are dressed in youthful attire. Babies are still born. A train may come. It is Sunday. One man begins to walk. (Eunice de Souza1997:29-30)

The poem ‗Bombay‘ in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, (2008) edited by Jeet Thayil, gives a macro history of the city‘s multicultural life and sharply comments on the way the city has grown,

Your future scrawled ten storeys high and inside sewage pipes Some live unwarranted. (281)

There is a new poem by Silgardo titled ‗Between‘, in the collection, These My Words:

The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry, (2012) edited by Eunice De Souza and Melanie

Silgardo, that shows the poet living in the ‗Comfortable city‘ of London, missing her home city Bombay with its ‗crows‘, ‗cars in gridlock‘, ‗clatter of stainless steel from the neighbour‘s kitchen‘, of the

Uncomfortable city, bigger than life itself. I dream between continents. 325

Work can wait, lunch can wait. For now I simply want to knit moment to moment, city to city, the two halves of my life. (137-8)

Jeet Thayil‘s 60 Indian Poets anthology includes ‗Bombay‘, ‗Sequel to Goan Death‘,

‗1956-1976, a poem‘, ‗Stationary Stop‘ and five poems, numbered 1, 2, 3, 5,and 9, from the poem sequence, ‗Beyond the comfort zone‘. The last poem is also included in Thayil‘s Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets

Silgardo‘s new poems ‗Between‘ and ‗Beyond the Comfort Zone‘ have been composed as a diaspora poet. But they do not have the stressfulness about displacement and migration that is often expressed in Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt, and in Imtiaz Dharker‘s first four volumes. The poem, ‗Between‘ uses the words

‗comfortable‘ and ‗uncomfortable‘ to juxtapose life in London and life in Bombay, but shows that the heart may still long for the ‗uncomfortable‘. She wants to ‗knit together the two halves‘ of her life, thereby hinting towards equipoise rather than conflict. The poems in the sequence, ‗Beyond the Comfort Zone‘ (Poem numbers 1,

2, 3, 5 and 9) take a larger time-and-space view of migration and displacement, encompassing the world of the sky, water and earth, birds, insects, and humans. But the trauma of human displacement is not glossed over against this macrocosmic context.

The first poem in this sequence refers to three geographical names, Salthouse, Arctic, and Holkham that locate her on a Norfolk coastline. She looks at the pristine expanse of land and air and says,

Holkham beach is the span of my hand. I can bounce a message off that star and reach someone in Bombay or Beirut. Everything is within reach. (Thayil, Bloodaxe Book 283)

326

Silgardo includes the marvels of modern technology where distances have been connected via satellite without once using a technical term. The two places Bombay, the speaker‘s home, and Beirut that is the troubled site of conflicts in the east, (and linked to ‗Kandahar‘ in Poem Number 5 of the sequence) are smoothly brought together. The easy bouncing of messages with devices that may be held in the span of one‘s hand, the speaker‘s thoughts of countries in the east while on a scenic beach in the North Sea are some of the many things that lie beneath the surface of this poem which on the face level could also be a child‘s wondrous play with stars, distances,

(hand-spanning the horizon) and random place names. Silgardo‘s poetry has depths of suggestions and are compact and precise in their use of words. Not for her the complex tapestry of history and geography through texts, as in Meena Alexander, or in Sujata Bhatt. Her poems are deceptively compact with depths of unstated meanings. The second poem is of six lines:

The housemartins, small and sure as darts, bullseye into their mud huts under the eaves. Birds of dual nationality, they winter in Africa (ornithologists don‘t know exactly where) and return for the summer, masons from another land. This place is home and also a long way from home. (Thayil, Bloodaxe Book 283-4)

Here again the poet juxtaposes the borderless world of natural creatures by using the vocabulary of borders __ ‗dual nationality‘, and the fact that for them habitat is in continent rather than nation __ ‗they winter in Africa / (ornithologists don‘t know exactly where)‘. (Thayil 283-4) Also by use of the term ‗masons from another land‘

Silgardo indicates the migrations of workforces, skilled and unskilled across borders.

The description of their homes as ‗mud huts‘ aligns them to the worlds of the east, as well to the ecology. Silgardo also inflects the word ‗home‘ with connotations of building rather than mere location. 327

The third poem in the sequence speaks of a Mrs Patel, working at a store

‗laying her Avon catalogues on the counter‘. Silgardo notes how,

Beneath the scents of lavender and rose lurk the base notes of asafoetida ghosts of last night's dinner. (Thayil, Bloodaxe Book 284)

She is descended from the indentured labour from India that was taken to British

Africa during the Raj and who as British citizens had to be taken in by Britain in the

1960s when another regime came to power in Kenya. But there is another side to the story of labour migration. Silgardo tells us about Mrs. Patel‘s cousin,

Her cousin who never left Gujarat works in a call centre. He knows the weather in Derby, and all the names of the new family in Eastenders. (Thayil, Bloodaxe Book 284)

Poem 5 says. ‗There are no gods in Guantanamo Bay‘ and that the only thing one will hear or see is the scratching of the prisoners upon the dirt, ‗occasionally a lost prayer, a wingless dove‘. She speaks of a prisoner‘s family, as

A family in Kandahar who never knew their son, or know him too well, are posting messages in the air.

Like Dharker‘s poems about 9/11 and the post-9/11 paranoia regarding terrorists and the potential terrorist being someone‘s son, Silgardo‘s poems too refer by name and place to the much publicised atrocities of the post-9/11 backlash. It shows another global movement of people in war and as prisoners of war. ‗Silgardo‘s poems are more violent and adrenalized than those of any other woman of the Bombay school‘ writes Jeet Thayil in his note on Silgardo in 60 Indian Poets.(289)

After the contemporary horror of Guantanamo, poem 9 in the sequence brings together instances of migrations from history, pre-history, from the animal and insect world but also to early colonial conquest. This poem sequence in its offering of global histories and migrations, its encyclopaedic range and style of referencing, its 328 sympathies and alignments, is markedly postcolonial and diasporic and removed from her early poetry written in India about complaints against the father, and against the stasis of her life. But unlike many of Alexander‘s or Bhatt‘s poems of India,

Silgardo‘s poetry does not present India in terms of memory, mediatized history or news or commentating. Silgardo‘s India is one that has been lived in till adulthood, and raged against in what she calls her ‗adolescent poetry‘. Now as a diaspora poet and an older woman, she moves beyond that to see things in larger perspective. This gives to her poetry a sense of calm assessment with a clear stand on issues. Of the poets discussed so far Silgardo thus stands both with the poets residing in India as well with the diaspora, having clearly marked areas in her corpus that are pre and post migration.

Charmayne D‘ Souza, like Tara Patel stopped writing poetry after her first book A Spelling Guide to Woman.(1990) These two poets along with Silgardo and

Dharker are the only ones among the modern poets who are not professors of English

Literature. Except for Tara Patel, all three have studied English literature in college.

Since their early days, Charmayne D‘ Souza and Tara Patel moved to professions not linked to the writing of poetry. Silgardo‘s work as commissioning editor in U.K. has kept her engaged with writers although in a different capacity. Silgardo has been writing, as is evident from the poems that are now being published in anthologies.

Charmayne D‘Souza, was published in Zide‘s 1993 anthology, followed by Nine

Women Poets (1997). Her last anthology poem was in 2005, in Confronting Love:

Poems, edited by Jerry Pinto and Arundhati Subramaniam.

She has been excluded from large anthologies such as Thayil‘s 2008 anthologies, 60

Indian Poets and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, Sudeep Sen‘s anthology The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry (2012) as well as Eunice de 329

Souza and Melanie Silgardo‘s These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry.

(2012) D‘Souza‘s only collection, A Spelling Guide to Woman (1990) however continues to be an area for research scholars of women‘s poetry. The book has an

Introduction written by Nissim Ezekiel where Ezekiel expressing approval and enjoyment of her poetic skills also notes that her gift for poetry ‗can lead to appropriate aspiration, higher aims, difficult themes, a wider range of explorations, subtler and profounder ideas used with demanding language skills‘. (Charmayne

D‘Souza x) Charmayne D‘ Souza is ‗a practising counsellor and family therapist‘. She took an M.A. in Northern State College, USA after an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Bombay. According to Eunice de Souza Charmayne D‘Souza

‗feels, as other poets sometimes do, that poetry becomes increasingly difficult to write after one‘s first book, ‗What will my students think? My in-laws? My husband?‘ She has also stated, ‗I write about vivid inner experiences rather than localized spaces.

Maybe I will change as I become far-sighted with age‘. (Eunice de Souza, Nine Indian

Women Poets, 82) The persona that comes across in Charmayne D‘ Souza‘s poems, sarcastic, smart with words, critical, and mocking is at odds with the diffidence of the above admission. Given these contexts Charmayne D‘ Souza‘s single collection of poems continues to be reprinted by the publishers Orient Longman under the imprint of Disha Books.

A Spelling Guide to Woman is divided into four sections titled Alpha α , Beta

β, Gamma γ and Delta δ, each accompanied by the corresponding Greek alphabet. In terms of thematic progression, the first two sections deal with gender issues, not from an academic or agit-prop perspective, but simply as a series of personal reactions. Yet these reactions are also the reactions of young generations, the reactions of youth. The poem from A Spelling Guide to Woman that has found place in Pinto and 330

Subramaniam‘s Confronting Love: Poems, is ‗I would Like to Have a movie Cowboy for a Husband‘. It visualizes him

walking into the sagebrush, with infinite possibilities of never returning again, exterminated by an inscrutable Comanche, a stubbled renegade, or a crook general. . . . Our lovemaking would have the sweep of brushfire, … the crisp certainty of death, our life the aroma of fried bread, beans and hash, and the guarantee, always lurking somewhere in the background, that the goods would last for only two or three years, that our marriage could be deliciously wiped out, like an Indian tribe, forever‘. (Pinto and Subramaniam 16-17)

The love fantasy derived from Hollywood Westerns and the happy assurance of impermanence is a modern version of the married woman‘s love longing for Krishna in the poetry of Sarojini Naidu and Kamala Das. On the subject of marriage

Charmayne D‘Souza says, in A Spelling Guide to Woman, (1990) how, ‗A good

Catholic husband / is still hard to find‘ and chooses to blame a female ancestor for her religion in largely Hindu India:

There must have been some woman in the lineage who introspected, harvested rice, bore a son, bored her husband, (19)

331 and who

could have gawked at St. Francis Xavier (original) skin, bone and toe intact, and decided promptly to eat bread and wine, for the rest of her life, for the rest of my life for that matter. (19)

She imagines this female ancestor‘s husband

….twirling his switch –blade Konkan moustache, may have said __ ―Silly wife! Now who will marry our daughters?‖

Little realizing that four hundred years later, his words would ring as true as the cathedral bells…

A good Catholic husband is still hard to find. (20)

This is one narrative of conversion to Christianity in India; there are others. India, with its multiple religions and Hindu caste system is still rigid about borders when it comes to marriages. So much so that even marriage within the same religion but between two different linguistic and regional groups __ even decades after Sarojini

Naidu‘s inter-caste marriage under the Special Marriages Act in colonial India ___ can become the subject of an immensely popular novel and movie such as Chetan

Bhagat‘s Two States. The ‗unmarried‘ state is not desirable and like Tara Patels‘

‗Single Woman‘ Charmayne D‘Souza‘s ‗A Maiden‘s Prayer‘ in A Spelling Guide to

Woman, (1990) describes loneliness in the following terms,

the sound of rain, a substitute for a human voice, everything natural, and in its place. Peace, 332

such as it may be called, beckons with an uneasy grace, does not sit too lightly on my head. Security from the vagaries of love can only offer me its own cares. (21)

The poem, ‗Me?‘ recalls Kamala Das‘s impassioned plea to all the ‗I‘s of the world, ‗I too call myself ‗I‘(‗An Introduction‘) when Charmayne D‘Souza writes,

I have been too long in search of someone who will turn around and say: ―You, I presume, are me, how do you do? Stay.‖ (12)

Loneliness leads her to also comment in the poem ‗Teeth-edged‘ how undocumented this condition is, so that,

A few milleniums hence, when they excavate the area around where I lived, and find that only my teeth have survived, these are the conclusions anthropologists will draw: that I brushed them twice a day, ate meat often (affluent) gnawed bones healthily … and was only thirty-five years old … so why did I die?‘ These are the answers anthropologists will not record: that I often snacked upon my soul, sugar coated my truth, nibbled bit by bit upon my pride, snapped life-lines off with ease, and even looked gift-horses in the mouth to discern cavities.( 13-4)

The poem records the overly critical, fastidious and uncompromising requirements of the thirty-five year old woman (in India then, considered to be past the marriageable 333 age) and its tone of regret. That she was dead at thirty-five despite being physically healthy still keeps the cause of death unanswered. The last stanza gives a clue but keeps the verdict unstated. The speaker says,

No historian will record how my teeth were set on edge by my own bile, nor how they chattered when I turned myself out from my own door. My teeth will serve as recording mile-stones only of the unimportant details in my life __ to anthropologists. To myself : they were my own private stepping stones to despair. (14)

Eunice de Souza‘s poetry records some of her early rage __ ‗Yes, I‘ve tried suicide‘, she writes in ‗Autobiographical‘. In fact the theme of suicide goes back to Plath and

Sexton in the 1960s. The point of Charmayne D‘ Souza‘s poem is not just that she

‗turned myself out/ from my own door‘, ( a metaphor perhaps of the soul leaving the body) but that it was a futile act. There is no knowledge system that can gauge despair as the cause of ‗death‘ of a thirty five year old woman. ‗Star Peace‘ too sets off her personal situation against the vastness of galactic knowledge such as Newton‘s and though geological time keeps moving across the universe, it cannot belittle her personal world which has to sustain itself despite the great goings on in the cosmos:

I am my own light, my only stay my own orbit. (13-4)

The title of her book indicates the new vocabulary required to define Woman. So the first poem, the title poem, plays on the phonetics of ‗women‘ __ ‗

Woo men, womb men, woe men, whim men, 334

warm men, who, men? no, woman. (1)

The second poem titled ‗The Rational Animal‘ shows how women are ready to submit to the male of the species even though he may have little charm or intelligence or health and states that ‗After all, men are such animals,

little thinking that by acting the sacrificial goat, she too comes among the genus of quadrupeds. (2-3)

Charmayne D‘Souza is direct and does not speak of women as victims but as colluding in their own ruin. She does not talk of poor women, abused girls, but of the subtler aspects of cultural conditioning that keeps women tied to a subject position.

Her Catholic background makes her use the myths and strictures of her religion in sharper ways than her teacher Eunice de Souza. For instance the poem titled ‗Judith‘ alludes to the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes and says that,

If I could, I would cut off my lovers‘ heads one by one and serenade them to sleep in my spare time.

She says that most of them

have not in any way interfered with my life, except in sleep. Those that keep me awake deserve their heads on a pike, and not on a pillow. Where‘s my sword, I say? (26)

The last line makes the rage theatrical rather than real; dramatizing rage becomes its own sublimation. This sense of caricature introduces wry humour and despite the shocking sentiments expressed gives them a twist, or, as Ezekiel says in his 335

Introduction, to A Spelling Guide to Woman, ‗Her self- mockery and her criticism of other people never goes to extremes‘. (x) Yet the truth does get stated, the rage does get expressed. Mamta Kalia‘s poem, ‗Sheer Good Luck‘ in the Tribute to Papa volume(1970) seems to have influenced the critical tone in some of Eunice de Souza as well as Charmayne D‘ Souza‘s poetry.

Charmayne D‘ Souza uses double-entendres to subvert religious teaching. The poem ‗The Passion‘ with its pun shows a snub to a would-be lover :

He says __ There‘s a skeleton rattling in your closet; You don‘t need another body upon the cross, it‘s a man you need, not some substitute little god. I say __ It‘s easier to worship a man who‘s crucified than to watch myself impaled, slowly dying‘. It‘s Christ for me, not Mary Magdalene. (32)

This could be Mirabai, refusing to consummate her earthly marriage as she is already wed to Girdhar ___ a feminist assertion of sexual choice, the way to say no.

The Magdalene theme is given a more scorching variation in the poem ‗When

God First Made a Whore‘ where she lists among the ingredients God used,

the howl of the wolf, the flexibility of the politician‘s law, and the smoothness of the guillotine‘s saw. Said the Almighty Lord: ―Men, I have given you the Almighty Broad. (4)

The body of this woman is described in a series of images,

the last life left to the cat, the sinking ship to a deserting rat 336

…Adam‘s rib chewed to bone, to blood, and the stone that hurled Abel to the mud. (4)

‗A Salted Woman‘ alludes to the story of Lot‘s wife but turns the image on its head by quoting people commenting on this spinster (‗salted‘ as in well preserved for posterity like salted meat or fish),

A woman of thirty-four, so virtuous, they say, she has not banged a door in anger, hate or impudence. Closed it gently, instead, over her life, and never looked back, except shyly, … Turned then into different pillar of salt …sodium chloride… The crystals closest to the heart were clear, grainy, hexagonal and unshatterable‘, while (the salt grains or tears) Those that escaped sometimes from the upper extremities were only for the highly extreme moments __ when others smashed the door. (27-8)

D‘ Souza takes the word play further with,

So virtuous they say, she walked only from pillar to post, and back again… Swept the good life into symmetric salt cellars away from curious stares, paid no Roman soldier in salty kind, but gave a token coin to the Roman church, 337

and became a pillar of her kind. (28)

The poem alludes to Eunice de Souza‘s poem ‗Catholic Mother‘ which had been about Pillar of the Church, Francis X D‘Souza, whose wife silently bore him a large number of children. Here it is a thirty five year old single woman whose meekness makes her a pillar of the church. This kind of reworking of myths is a feminist project and has precedents in the writings of Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and others. By the seventies, feminism was interrogating Christian iconography in studies by Mary

Jacobus and others. Charmayne D‘ Souza‘s poetry taps into this trend, but re- contextualizes it in the contemporary and specific setting of the Goan Catholic community, just as Imtiaz Dharker was looking at the context of Muslim women in

Scotland in Purdah. The next two sections of A Spelling Guide to Woman, deal with themes other than the Catholic single woman‘s angst. ‗No Sir, I do not wish to remain in the USA‘ had been first published in 1987 in Indian Literature, the Sahitya

Akademi journal, in its July-August issue. The immigrant misses the monsoon rain that back home had fallen ‗democratically‘ on all, and where people were warmer.

There was nothing to induce them to stay,

The hat was empty of promises and rabbits, our souls had been cut in half. (45)

The poet knows what is there back home but it was preferable to this,

It was time we returned before we became invisible, back then to our own Indian rope tricks which had held us ensnared all those years, yet promised us their own tortuous path to heaven. (45-6)

338

A similar home-sickness persists below the surface of the poem ‗The White Line

Down the Road to Minnesota‘ where she writes how the line is

unidirectional __ little knowing what it achieves in its whiteness, dividing left from right, those coming from those going, those being overtaken from those overtaking. (47)

Silgardo‘s poem of homesickness sitting at her desk in calm and beautiful London, fondly recalls the grime and chaos of Bombay traffic, ‗The hootootoot of cars in gridlock‘ in ‗Between‘ in the 2012 anthology These My Words.(137) It would seem that these poets are having a conversation across decades, through their poetry.

Charmayne D‘ Souza in A Spelling Guide to Woman concludes by saying how the white line means different things to different persons,

a life line for those moving on, a strait-jacket for those yet unborn‘. (48)

Clearly the poet sees no freedom for future generations in the USA. And for a writer in the USA perhaps, life has to be dramatic, according to her poem ‗Writers, they say,

Have to Live Life Fully‘. It parodies the trend of using one‘s life as a spectacle in one‘s writing. Once again she takes her parody to an absurd point to achieve full effect. In order to live life fully she would have to marry some gigantic American

Indian who writes stories for children while serving time in prison, they would need to have sextuplets all of whom would die, then she could write a story about it, ‗one that the editor would not be able to criticize as shallow, and lacking any resemblance to characters living or dead‘. After all this was done,

I would carry on with the usual bovine business of living that part of my life 339

given to me just for living, and not writing about. (50)

Among the poems of sojourn abroad, is ‗A Visit To The Metropolitan Museum of Art‘, where she views ‗the weapons‘, ‗the tombs‘, ‗the soup ladles,

the gourd bowls‘, Finally, the amulets and charms that failed against our all-too- strong mortality. (55)

‗Winter in South Dakota‘ documents the snow covered landscape in terms of different metaphors and similes concluding with a metaphor of benediction,

the earth‘s sins have been white-washed this day, under the perfect sky of a South Dakota winter. (56)

Her Catholic denomination continues to structure her poems in both personal-critical mode or in landscape description. The only poem about nature in her oeuvre does not sentimentalize nature either, there is enough in the poem to hint at more jagged aspects of nature, as she describes what she sees passing by (outside a car window presumably):

Shark fins swim through snowdrifts, then leer past you as mere rocks. (56)

The poems in this third section, ‗Gamma‘ in A Spelling Guide To Woman, are set in the USA.

The last section ‗Delta‘ has poems set in India. In this section, the poet speaks of friends, the English language in India, and the crowds. Her poem ‗Train of Thought

II‘ has been anthologized and is an upbeat poem about the nation that does not gloss 340 over its problems yet makes something positive out of it. She speaks of colonial architecture built to keep out the natives :

City within a city, sunspace, shadowspace, nautilus shell, cathedral, barn, dancehall, transit station to hell and back again. The British knew how to bring a nation together __ an elbow in the rib, a space divided. (63) The last line hints obliquely at the Partition too, not just architecture. The next lines refer to the overcrowding on Indian trains (railways too built by the British):

They didn‘t reckon that when a man swallowed another‘s breath, saw the landscape of his face up close, touched the earth of his skin, there would be no going back Bone of bone, flesh to flesh, India travels in the same direction from nine to five, and survives, together. (64)

There is an angry father-poem, ‗Coffee Or Me?‘ alluding to the 1967 bestseller, Coffee, Tea or Me? memoir by two fictitious airhostesses or stwardesses

Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones. By relocating the question, as ‗Coffee or Me?‘ within the father-daughter context of choices in life, D‘Souza uses humour to express anger.

In A Spelling Guide to Woman, The father tells the daughter to study economics so that she will

know how to run his coffee plantations in Chikmagalur which I will one day inherit. The daughter wants to take history, ‗I love history‘ and says, my father couldn‘t care a damn about coffee, he never drinks it anyway, 341

and besides, what is he doing in Kuwait then? and says, Maybe I can kill him with the Law of Diminishing Returns. She concludes with, The man who never learns from history is condemned to repeat it. My father‘s father died, they say __ from drink. (65-6)

The poem on marriage in this section, ‗Strange Bedfellows‘ focuses not on the Catholic community but on the Hindu marriage:

I have marked this woman out for me. We will be tied together by the scarlet sari of her blood. Seven times around the fire of my shots. What have I done Done for all my unborn sons. (68)

The poem stresses marriage as a bondage as the groom further says __

Her mangalsutra will be a bullet to her breast, My garland a hempen rope around my neck. (68)

‗God‘ the much blamed character of the first two sections is back once again here in the poem, ‗God‘s Will‘ with a pun on ‗will‘ which has given her a ‗strange legacy‘ of

one holocaust, thirty five wars. a few million tortured and killed. (70)

342

The poem recalls Kamala Das‘s ‗An Inheritance‘, about communal violence that has been our ‗inheritance‘. The poet disputes the will saying that not the wars and tortures, but other things were meant to be her portion.

I understood: my holdings were to consist of one slice of good earth, a dove bearing an olive branch, a rainbow bowing to the sun, and of course, my daily bread, So far, I have not received any of this... I ask you: is the will still valid? Am I still an heir?‘ (70-1) and the final irony as they inform her that a will can be effective only when the benefactor dies, whereas

we have reason to believe that He whom you speak of is still alive. (D‘ Souza 71)

The joke is that as long as god lives she will not get her portion __ a slice of good earth, /a dove bearing an olive branch, / a rainbow bowing to the sun. She will only get things like the holocaust. Another poem that challenges clichés such a ‗god‘s will‘.

A poem titled ‗A Visit To The Home For The Mentally Retarded‘ (today known as

Intellectual Disability) indicates the poet‘s future vocation as counsellor and therapist.

The poem conveys the deep impact of the visit and the humbling of all pretensions of knowledge. Being a poet of wordplay she uses the term Mongol (invaders) to allude to the racially abusive labelling of people as well as the initial use of the term 343

‗mongoloid‘ for Down Syndrome.49 The visit wipes out her prior notions of intelligence and knowledge:

The Mongols have invaded my mind, razed all to rock-bottom I.Q‘ Have slavered over their biscuits, and tied us to their exercise chairs. (72)

In plain language without wordplay, she writes the last lines,

It would have been easier, I think, to take away my mind, and leave them theirs…. (72)

Like many of the poets discussed here, Charmayne D‘ Souza too has a poem on the matter of language. She mocks the rules of English grammar in the context of illiteracy and death (the leveller). By the 1990s ‗Indian English‘ had become a stay of advertisements and MTV culminating in pop star Alisha Chinai‘s hit song Made In

India in 1995. In 1991, D‘ Souza‘s poem ‗Not An Empty Stop (By an English

Teacher)‘ writes,

Certainly, death cannot be suffered gladly by the illiterate, or the ungrammatical, fools who slapdash haphazardly through the printed age. There is a propriety to be observed about these things, a just and English God who knows the stylish connotations of comma and dot, or the mark of surprise and sorrow. The mockery continues in the last lines: Death holds no sting for me, all it can carry is a comma in its tail, and the promise of punctuality with my fate. (73-4) 344

It may be mentioned here that D‘Souza also bypasses rules of capital and small letters by using the capital letter for articles, conjunctions and prepositions. Her poem titles reflect this.

By the end of the collection D‘Souza‘s poetry mentions friends. Compared to the isolation and alienation of the poems in the Alpha and Beta sections, there has been progression. Again, humour keeps the theme of friendship from being overrated

__ a sign of self-sufficiency perhaps that seems to be the outcome of years of corrosive singleness __ just as dark humour had kept the poems on loneliness from lapsing into the maudlin. The title ‗To My Tall Friends And To My Short Friends‘ expresses the terms and conditions upon which her love for them hinges:

I love my tall friends, and if they protect me from the falling bomb, and shade me from the searing sun, I will love them for ever. (75)

There is a challenge to her tall friends to protect her, and the implication that love for ever is not going to be possible. The love for her ‗short friend‘ however is due to the fact that

they restore my sense of liberty, fraternity, equality, and if they always sit in front of me at the movies, I will love them even more. (75)

This states the idea of friendship as, if not fraught with threats of enmity, at least dosed with a good pinch of salt. 345

The last poem unpacks the idea of ‗morals‘. Titled ‗The Wrong Tax Bracket‘ it says the poor cannot afford morals, the rich can but won‘t, and the middle class has a

‗right to … moral scruples‘. ‗But‘ she says,

either I will struggle so hard to be rich, in order not to become poor that I won‘t have the time to claim my morals at all. There is nothing like a good moral to end all fairy tales. (80)

As the last line to her only collection __ There is nothing/like a good moral/ to end all fairy tales __ Charmayne D‗Souza has stated the state of the world, without crying about it. Her poetry cannot be called confessional, it is critical without being complaining. The power of her poetry is in the irreverence, towards family, church and state, towards English, and a blazing honesty about the real nature of romance, friendship and morals. In terms of themes, love, marriage, singleness, life abroad.

Charmayne D‘ Souza‘s concerns may be seen in many of the Indian women poets.

But in her poem the language of controlled anger is used to cover up misery. There is a hint in ‗A Salted Woman‘ of holding back and not crying,

Swept the good life into symmetric salt cellars away from curious stares.(27)

The poem ‗Tear-mask‘ resolves that when she chooses a man she will survey him through a haze of pipe smoke ‗of the Watson and Holmes variety‘, that their furniture will be ‗smoke screens in the corner‘, that they will wear gas-masks on off days‘. Her poems on marriage use the vocabulary of war. The poem on the mentally retarded therefore stands out in the collection. The way Charmayne D‘ Souza has moved away from writing poetry seems to endorse the detachment of the poetic persona in A 346

Spelling Guide to Woman. However, like Tara Patel who too has just one collection of poems to her name, Charmayne D‘Souza remains an important voice among the

Indian poets writing in English.

Smita Agarwal’s Introduction to Marginalized: Indian Poetry in English

(2014), a collection of essays on Indian English Poetry edited by her, has a subheading with a question mark __ ‗Introduction: Subaltern Discourse?‘ Pointing to the marginalization in modern times, of poetry, by fiction, and the further marginalization of Indian English Poetry post-independence, after the voices of

Tagore, Aurobindo and Sarojini Naidu, have had their day, she locates in recent times a critical shift in the study of Indian English poetry. Triggered by the non-inclusion of regional literatures in the Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997 jointly edited by

Elizabeth West, Salman Rushdie, and Seamus Deane, there has been a revisiting of critical approaches to Indian poetry as well. Agarwal cites the instance of Eunice de

Souza, who in 1997, (Nine Indian Women Poets) had spoken of Sarojini Naidu‘s poetry as ‗mindless versifying‘, but eight years later in 2005, in Early Indian Poetry recognizes indigenous influences on Naidu‘s versification: ‗A fair amount of classical

Indian poetry in Sanskrit and Tamil is brief, restrained, allusive. But there are also traditions of a more lavish emotionalism, the ghazal for instance with which Sarojini

Naidu would have been undoubtedly familiar. It would be interesting to know how much of this fed into her poetry…‘ (Quoted in Agarwal, 2014: 14-15)

Agarwal‘s poetry began to appear in journals from 1991. It was in 2002 that her first collection, Wish Granting Words appeared. Her second book Mofussil

Notebook has just come out from Calcutta in 2016. The first book has as epigraph, two lines in Urdu from Faiz Ahmad Faiz. The epigraph to the second volume is from the 19th century Urdu poet Zauq. Both epigraphs are in Devanagri script. Agarwal is 347 the only Indian poet to prefix Urdu and Hindi to collections of poetry in English.

Gauri Deshpande, Kamala Das and Mamta Kalia, are bilingual poets who have kept their English writing separate from their work in the mother tongue. As discussed earlier both Das and Kalia have experienced hostility towards English. Agarwal discusses this issue in the Introduction to Marginalized , indicating the perception of elitism associated with English poetry in India. She points out that,

In the regional languages and dialects of India, it is not at all uncommon for people from the lower classes and rural backgrounds to express themselves in poetry. However in the case of poetry from India in English, Jayanta Mahapatra is the only instance of a successful poet with the provenance of a non-elitist lower middle class background, who seems to have experienced poverty first hand….However, now, Jayanta Mahapatra is no longer writing in English. He has embraced his mother tongue Oriya to express his feelings. ( Agarwal 2014 : 16-7)

Agarwal also cites Tabish Khair‘s reading of Sarojini Naidu‘s poem ‗Village Song‘ that shows ‗how the tradition of Indian languages blends seamlessly with the textual aspects of written and spoken English when a poet composes‘. (Agarwal 2014: 24)

Agarwal concludes with the hope that as more and more persons from non-elite sections of Indian society begin to adopt English as a ticket to upward mobility, it may augur well for Indian poetry in English. She cites an English poem ‗Pativrata‘ written by ‗Ranjanadevi Chavan Patil, a woman and a Dalit, who studied English as second language, and is now a college teacher in Maharashtra‘. (Agarwal 2014: 24-

25)

These excerpts from Agarwal‘s ‗Introduction: Subaltern Discourse?‘ in

Marginalized show how the critical approach to Indian poetry in English is changing, how English poetry by Indians is not to be regarded simply in terms of colonial, postcolonial, western-modernist, hybrid and so on but as an amalgam of multiple influences and formations varying across the regional, linguistic, and cultural 348 permutations of each poet. What this thesis has however traced are the connections, of theme and style, of at times a conversation between the poets inscribed in their poetry.

Every poet writes with a certain idea of the intention of poetry. Smita Agarwal holds that ‗a poem performs a civilizing function, answering not only a human need for emotional expression but for rational control as well‘. 50 Her poems rewrite the language of passion and angst, of rage and rebellion, as well as the format of Indian

English poetry. She extends the boundaries of this poetry into new themes, as well as new ways of using the language.

Smita Agarwal‘s poetry first appeared in 1991 in The Bombay

Literary Review‘s Issue No. 1. This was one of the short lived poetry journals that emerged in the 1980s. Of the three poems __ ‗Perplexities‘, ‗Summer 1978: a

Requiem‘, and ‗Fever‘, published in 1991, only the last poem ‗Fever‘ has been included in her 2016 collection Mofussil Notebook. Her 2015 poem ‗Giving It Back‘ published in Muse India, Issue 60, Mar-April, 2015, keeps the promise of its title and expresses vengefulness against a mentor figure (male) who broke her heart again and again.

Now she, the pupil, has outdone him. How does it feel now, old man? When you're down and out And past your prime, To have your face Ground in grime, To be made aware of your crime?

Your student – using with finesse, The monkeyshines you taught her Half in jest, considering them Not worth a pice – ‘Now minting a million "likes"!.

Her You Tube video's gone viral …‘ (Agarwal, 2015)

349

The speaker‘s youth is evident in the last lines. But the poem also does more than show rage, it indicates the shift in the world where the captive ‗audience‘ of the old man‘s time has now exploded into a global audience of millions, and this contemporary audience is free to respond. The new language and frame of reference,

‗Her You Tube video‘s gone viral…‘ shows how the student has not only learnt from the old man, but been empowered by the cyber age, as well. The rage that one sees in

Agarwal‘s poetry, is not autobiographical, it is the poet‘s view of the rage that simmers in modern day India. The poem pre-empts some of the poems of Mofussil

Notebook such as ‗I Love You‘, where

Babli Pandey says "I love you …" to Bittu Sonkar. The campus is agog … A high-caste girl, Brahmin at that, Wanting to wed a Backward boy …(51)

Babli‘s brother and his friends beat up Sonkar with ‗Cycle-rickshaw chains /And crowbars‘. Sonkar,

for a month, lies festering In the town's most Infection-riddled zone, The Govt. Medical College. …(51) but survives. Now the backward class warlords rally behind Sonkar and Siege-like conditions prevail

Around the university's SSL Hostel Where Pandey and his chaps Are holed-up …

Meanwhile, Babli, willingly Abducted by the Sonkar gang, Under the banner of the progressive Arya Samaj, marries Bittu; A scene-from-a-movie like exchange Of garlands in the presence Of the liberal intellectual, Prof. Das … 24x7, the mofussil town's single tv channel 350

Blazes footage of Babli weds Bittu. (51-3)

Inter-caste love against a background of caste violence is a reality of contemporary

India and the subject of popular Indian cinema. The Romeo-Juliet element in the situation had been recently successfully used in the film Goliyon ki Raasleela released in 2013. Agarwal does not refer to this film, but to another film Bunty or Babli, a

Bollywood version of Bonny and Clyde. She shows how the real situation is a tangle of the cinematic and the political. As a theme it is new in Indian English poetry. That the reality of small town India, caste conflict, student politics could be the subject of

Indian poetry in English is a new direction. In poems by Tara Patel, Mamta Kalia, critical small town voices have been indicated, just as there have been portrayals of the repressive aspects of the Goan Catholic community in the poetry of Eunice de

Souza, Melanie Silgardo and Charmayne D‘ Souza. Such critical repressive buzz is shown to be directed at women exercising choice. In Smita Agarwal‘s poem ‗I Love

You‘ casteism finds resitance in the ‗liberal intellectual, Prof. Das‘. His professional life as a teacher of English Literature in suburban India is sketched in realistic detail,

Next morning, Dr. Das takes An extra class on "Break, break, break …" And discusses the forthcoming Freshers‘ Function In room # 8, where he shall encourage Boys and girls of postgrad English To dance to "Tera, tera, tera suroor" And "Beedi Jalaile" … (52) As he descends the stairs, the good professor is waylaid by Babli‘s angry brother,

Birju Pandey and his goons,

Residual decency cannot make Birju punch the don in his face. So he pulls out a matchbox, Strikes a match, waves the flaming Stick, menacingly, three times, 351

Under the paralysed prof's nose And growl's "Last chance, saar …"(52)

The professor dies of a heart attack right there, while

The girls of the class let out a collective Squeal and beg forgiveness for his lapses… . . . Tension is temporarily dissipated. Mofussil India's struggle With modernity, abated. The Babli Pandey, Bittu Sonkar Saga, by these unforeseen Circumstances aided and abetted, Postponed for the next Bright, new day …‘ (Mofussil Notebook,(52-3)

‗Mofussil India's struggle / With modernity‘ is what the poem ‗I Love You‘ is about. Agarwal‘s voice here is that of the anthropologist, the social scientist the observer narrator, but also the insider, the voice of one who belongs to this mofussil

India and can understand what drives it. She presents the convergence of traditional practices, (caste based arranged marriages, a girl‘s brother as keeper of family and caste honour) with popular romantic trends (cinema, music, dancing, ) ‗liberalism‘ ( the Arya Samaj, English literature as a subject of study, gender unsegregated co- educational colleges) politics (formations of activist groups on alert) college campuses as a site for love and politics ( valorised by popular Indian cinema) and the media ( 24x7 television channels further blurring the edges of real and reel life ).

In the process she also unpacks the idea of English poetry in India. The incongruity of the ‗break break break‘ of Tennyson‘s poem in a campus where bones have been broken, the ironic overwriting of Tennyson‘s elegy with mofussil style

Indian wedding of Babli and Sonkar, the ironic resemblance in cadence of ‗break break break‘ with the Hindi song ―Tera, tera, tera suroor", the students calling him

‗Saar‘, Prof.Das having to exhort students to participate in the Annual Function, his death by threat of violence, the in/significance of his death in the larger saga of Babli 352 and Sonkar, all underscore the unreality of English Literature as it is taught in Indian classrooms today. This is a subject that Agarwal feels strongly about, having wrestled with it as a professor of English in Allahabad.

The present day student-body is largely lower-middle-class wanting a job as fast as possible. Labouring under the delusion that an education in Eng. Lit. will grant him his wish, unable to grasp either the nuances of the language or the irrelevance of a syllabus now anachronistic in a postcolonial, postmodern setting, I see him, Sisyphus-like, being punished for something he is not responsible for. After a B.A. or an M.A. in Eng. Lit., his English is the pits and his world-view zilch… The first step is to revamp the courses we run; make them more relevant to the students opting for them, that is, make them job- oriented…, Eng. Lit. teaching should become interdisciplinary and eclectic in approach. Courses on translation, comparative literature, creative writing and spoken English should be framed and implemented. These will equip the young persons to work with regional and English language dailies and mass- circulation magazines. Spoken English and Language Labs will make them better TV presenters and call centre personnel. Our boys, (the girls can at least marry and opt for being set alight for several reasons) first generation out of an East U.P. village, at best become lawyers‘ clerks, shop assistants, those that manage to bribe – chaprasis, security guards, cooks and waiters in hotels and restaurants and household help. We have to give serious thought on how to make Eng. Lit. beneficial to them… Auden and Eliot fail to ignite their minds. Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak are inaccessible and dull for them… we have to rethink a syllabus that places Eng. Lit. centre stage and marginalises Indian English and other literatures…51

Agarwal‘s poetic practice includes the classroom experience both as a subject of poetry as in the poem, ‗Undergraduate Indian English: A Little Knowledge is a

Dangerous Thing‘, as well as the daily lived experience of life without sounding like a translation for a western audience in a poem such as ‗My Bindi‘ in Mofussil

Notebook. This collection is divided into five sections separated by quotations from

Indian English poets.

The poem ‗Undergraduate Indian English: A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous

Thing‘ along with ‗I Love You‘ is in the section demarcated by Nissim Ezekiel‘s famous line, ‗My Backward Place is where I am‘. The poem intersperses lines (in italics) spoken in grammatically incorrect ‗Indian English‘ by a student, with lines 353 by the poet and concludes with the poet‘s ruminations on the destinies of such students. The student‘s lines are kept to the right side of the page, and the lines spoken by the poet/ narrator/English teacher are to the right. In the poem,

‗Undergraduate Indian English: A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing‘, in

Mofussil Notebook, the student describes a birthday celebration at his house,

when I just eleven… All my friends come to my home And all comed people loved me… (48)

The poet now writes,

The language is a Historical Accident; Mother-tongue vs. the Acquired are the Yin and Yang of our lives. (Circa 1979) In the polar zone of a university‘s English Department molten minds Ossify with the monotony of formulaic Mind-games __ the body-language of A climacteric Academia. (48)

The next stanza continues:

Sometime when the party was on Its last stage, a burned candle fall Upon me __ in, on my back. I am not know, but slowly I know, My back is very burned…. … My brother and my father runned But the time is very gone. I burn All comed people, my parents, sad for me (48-9)

The juggernaut trundles on … A first generation out of his village Struts into the haloed portals Of a provincial town. (49)

The students sing of their alma mater,

Allahabad University, Allahabad University. Do Re Mi Mi Re Re Do Do Do, 354

Situated on the banks of the Ganga, Jamuna So Do Do Do Ti La So So… (49)

The poet continues, ‗With full throated ease he sings/ A paean for his Oxford of the

East‘ There is more of the student‘s narrative of disaster, getting hit by a truck on his way to the hospital, their car hits an advertisement Board, crowds gather, finally

we went with rickshaw to hospital. In the home, the family is sad. But my father told something to them Then they are not weeped. So, this is the little knowledge For the dangerous things In my life. (50)

In the last stanza the poet says how

Ram Prasad aspires towards becoming A Provincial Civil Servant. To be with-it, He wears khaki safari-suits …. … I am to Re-encounter him along the beaten track trade-route of English Language Exam. Scripts. Roll nos. 120585, 120589, 120593 __ Avatars of Ram Prasad extant, Ineradicable from personal history. (48- 50)

But there are also, happier outcomes of small town India‘s adoption of English as a language of upward mobility; it is the fusion of English and Hindi in Allahabad by the young crowd as a trendy way to speak. Agarwal‘s poem ‗Chutney: A

Multilingual Existential Poem‘ in Mofussil Notebook celebrates this re-formation of

English and its happy ambience. She shows how communication is effective when indigenous words are incorporated into the English language without fuss. She uses the term chutney to express the sharp tart hot and sweet flavour of this linguistic mixture:

We two were sitting agal-bagal on a charpai, under the sprawling Canopy of a neem tree, dressed in, 355

Sarees, chamkeeli, enjoying chuskis Of tea with kurkuri hot pakori (31)

As they sit and talk of this and that, the death by cancer of a saheli

Hari-bhari at fifty three, … Now Hari ko pyaari… Suddenly a kabootri decides to ‗splatter Our sisterly sorority with its droppings, Showering upon us the life-lesson: Always spice up the khichidi of zindagi With the zest of teekhi hari chutney And live life out, bindaas and tension-free… (31)

This is not the mimicry of a formal farewell to Miss Pushpa T S in what is called

‗babu english‘, nor a sad monologue by an ‗Indian Clerk‘, as in Nissim Ezekiel‘s poems. By now in this century, chutney English has ‗arrived‘ and Smita Agarwal‘s poem shows how comfortable its users are with the language on their tongue which too is like the compound of variety that is the chutney. This poem and ten others under the designation New Poems open the collection Mofussil Notebook. ‗Angrezi

Vangrezi‘ in this section narrates an experience aboard a cruise ship where ‗Roberto, /

The stand-up from Vegas, mimics how

. . .we of The subcontinent, speak English. U-ls-ka instead of Alaska U-tt-va for Ottawa, (29)

and later tells her

‗Hey Lady! I know you're from India! You speak English just the way they do In The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ...‘. (29)

Later at night she sings

Abba and the Carpenters To the Americans While they marvel and exclaim 356

At the Indian lady Singing so well... (29) She says how she hears people on the ship humming the same melodies in different registers,

From the Italian Captain of the ship Announcing on the public address system A sighting of whales on starboard, To the Phillipino waiters, The Malaysian deck-hands, The Columbian stewart, The Bangladeshi bar-tender, The female Chinese service-staff At the buffet ... (Mofussil Notebook 30)

The point of the poem is that people all over the world speak English differently, and their mother tongues inflect their English. All these people have found employment on the ship aided by their ability to speak and understand English. And while the international crew and passengers together represent the universality of English, their different registers show why the language survives. In north India, where the poet hails from it is simply another language ‗angrezi vangrezi‘. Nissim Ezekiel‘s poems in Indian English had parodied the English spoken by Indians as a language. It had shown the ‗elegant English‘ spoken by others as normative and the Indian English spoken at Miss Pushpa T S‘s farewell as the amusing variation. For Agarwal the issue of English or englishes is approached differently, with a realistic assessment of the place of English in India and why, as she says in her note cited above, the study of

English literature should be replaced by courses in spoken English. Agarwal‘s poems such as ‗Angrezi Vangrezi‘, or ‗I Love You‘, or ‗Chutney: A Multilingual Existential

Poem‘, are ways of looking at English in India, and in the world.

Being a singer Agarwal is also able to attempt a fusion of the English language with formats from Indian music, as in the poem ‗Ghazal: Smile‘. The couplet is used here with a distinctive affiliation to the ghazal form of poetry and 357 song. ‗Ghazal: Smile‘ has the same rhyme in the first five couplets, aa, aa, aa, aa, aa, and the next three have bb, bb, bb. She uses the traditional themes of the ghazal, such as the brevity of life, wisdoms for life, along with typical ghazal imagery of languid melancholy, ‗In my hand, a withered rose; in yours, a crushed leaf‘. The poem begins with the poet being asked to explain the meaning of her name in English, and the poem is an attempt to explain why ‗Smita‘, meaning ―Pleasant Smile‖ in English is a good name for a person. (25) Agarwal‘s easeful traverse across borders of language and forms in her English poetry takes the English poem by an Indian in a new direction that is rooted in the local and connected to the global. The twenty-first century is ambient in her poetry.

In a poem titled ‗Ghazal: Civil Lines, Allahabad‘, she reproduces the

‗complaints‘ of a group of ladies, mothers and wives of bureaucrats in the posh Civil

Lines area. It is a concatenation of voices whose varying complaints are nevertheless in tune with the luxury of the life they all have. Smita Agarwal‘s choice of the ghazal as a form for some of her poems has more than her association with Indian classical music. The ‗ghazal‘ form of poetry began to be practised by American poets in the

1960s. 52 Adrienne Rich‘s poem, ‗Late ghazal‘ ends with, ‗Life was always stronger .

. . the critics couldn‘t get it. / Memory says the music always ran ahead of the words‘.53

Among the Indian English women poets it is Agarwal who consciously experiments with form and looks outside poetry, in music for instance, for ways to utter. Her keen ear as a musician attunes her to the speech cadences of her Allahabad, her ‗backward place‘, whose language and ethos are sensitively and affectionately represented. 358

In the same section there is a poem, ‗Catechesis‘ about the convent school where rumours ripple among the girls, of Sr. Magdalene eloping with handsome Fr.

Francis. One of the girls, Smita, (like Eunice in the poem ‗Eunice‘ by Eunice de Suza)

Mightier than the sword is Smita‘s pen. It can dream, pontificate, count to ten … That Smita is all set to save other humans, savage; Keep them from harm, never allowing, Evil, humanity to ravage… (46)

This determination is derived from her school,

For such were the sermons nuns preached in school, The power of their words made every adolescent Hindu girl drool. (46)

She recalls how ‗those were the days‘ when Hindu daughters would tearfully request permission from their ‗dumbstruck parents‘ to join the convent. At such a time the scandal of the nun‘s elopement is a mercy for the parents. In poems such as these

Smita Agarwal uses a tortured, contrived version of the aa bb cc rhyming pattern common to novice rhymers to indicate the early gawky attempts at English poetry. In its depiction of the preaching nuns and their nubile students who __

feel cheated, their hopes looted; Why hadn‘t the bitch made off with Fr. Stanley instead, And left them free at fair Fr. Francis to stare?... (46)

___ the poem re-contextualizes the Catholic world of the Goan poets Eunice de Souza et al within a Hindu society in northern India. If the young Eunice or Charmayne had defied their families and fled from the Catholic community‘s suffocating hold on women, the Hindu girls try to enter the convent school as a stepping stone to English and romance and an aura of fashionable difference from the lives of their Hindu parents. But Hindu or Catholic, or Muslim in Leeds , be it Eunice de Souza or

Charmayne D‘ Souza, or Melanie Silgardo, or Imtiaz Dharker, religion cannot tame 359 the spirits of young women. In a very recent interview, ‗A Dialogue on Poetry‘ between Smita Agarwal and Dhruva Harsh, Agarwal says,

A poem is a fine balance of technique and feeling; a poem looks at the world around us like everyone else, but describes it differently and uniquely‘. 54

Also,

‗that a poet may live in the danger of inhabiting an imaginary world… is an

outdated Romantic notion not possible in contemporary times. Even virtual

reality is grounded in hardware and software. Similarly, a poet‘s imaginary

world must be moored in real time reality and expressed in a language

accessible to readers/listeners. 55

There are several poems by Agarwal that seem like a ‗writing back‘ to her peer poets. ‗At Forty‘ by Agarwal in her 2002 collection, Wish Granting Words seems to correct what Deshpande had expressed in her poem ‗The Habit‘ in Between Births

(1968) recalling how she was told she would ‗get used to it‘ when in childhood a puppy dog died. She gets used in later life to loss of an arm, a friend, a child, a shade.

And … I got over it I got used to it All dying and my living. Now when I see him crossing a street to me, coming swiftly How am I going to get used to him. (18)

Agarwal writes in ‗At Forty‘, in Wish Granting Words,

At forty she finds how redundant emotion is in the living of life. At nine __ the passing away of a puppy… At sixteen, heart break: her boyfriend whines He‘s leaving town. . .(38)

followed by a ‗nose-diving‘ marriage at thirty-three, ‗the extended family is weighing down heavily upon her‘, ‗fractious children‘, ‗vicious colleagues‘, 360

her car breaks down very often. The WC is clogged. At thirty-eight she loses her dad to diabetes. (38)

And in direct contrast to Deshpande‘s poem where pain and anxiety are allowed to persist despite a lifetime of hurts, Agarwal writes,

Crying gets her nowhere. Tears have lost their zing. Malleable-mop-up- mom has become a rational thing. (38)

Agarwal re-inscribes the function of poetry as a vehicle for spontaneous emotion and demonstrates through her own work that,

a poem performs a civilizing function, answering not only a human need for emotional expression but for rational control as well. (Eunice Souza, Nine Indian Women Poets, 60 )

After ‗At Forty‘, another turning point for ‗malleable-mop-up- mom‘ cum

‗rational thing‘ is at ‗Fifty Three‘. This poem in her second collection Mofussil

Notebook ‗talks back‘ to Eunice de Souza‘s poem ‗Pilgrim‘ where de Souza asks the god in his hill top shrine, ‗God rock, I‘m a pilgrim. / Tell me __ / Where does the heart find rest?‘ (de Souza A Necklace of Skulls, 48) De Souza‘s ‗Pilgrim‘, ‗Monsoon

Journey‘ and ‗The Hills Heal‘ in Women in Dutch Painting (1988) hark back to

Kamala Das‘s Annamalai Poems (1985) in Only the Soul Knows How to Sing, all poems about older women seeking solace in the mountains. Now in 2016, Smita

Agarwal writes in ‗At Fifty Three‘, to both the male god and the female god who have been discovered or made and housed by man.

shaped like phallus …more often than not, A priest discovers you embossed On a rock; female, eight-armed, Armed with trident, sword, Mace, chakra , bow Seated on your tiger throne. And there up on a hill or beside a lake, Someone builds for you, Your home. (39) 361

Like Charmayne D‘Souza in ‗God‘s Will‘, she tells these gods, ‗You lie through your teeth/ You never fulfil promises‘, and that, ‗I‘ve learnt to trust in / Science and logic, / not you‘. (39)

She recalls how once she made the pilgrimage, climbing the ‗million stairs‘ ‗To your temple /Of the trillion bells‘, ‗amongst a zillion others‘ and tied the ‗sacred thread‘ of her ‗petitions and fears‘ to the temple arch. ‗But you did not right the wrong‘. She realised that she had to be strong and not depend on anyone. But she also says how each time she cleaves open her chest like Hanuman reaching for her heart, she sees,

on its template The imprint Of your face… (40) thereby not countering, but engaging in a dialogue with the poems of faith by her peers, Kamala Das, and de Souza and the poem of loss of faith by Charmayne

D‘Souza.

Writing back, for Smita Agarwal is also a form of salute. The fourth section of

Mofussil Notebook is preceded by Eunice de Souza‘s line ‗I know women like that/ and not just in paintings‟ ___ from Women in Dutch Paintings. By making the connection between her aunts and friends in India, and the women in Dutch painting, de Souza had opened up a new way of seeing, of closing the gap between high culture

European art and unknown Indian women. That poem had re-scripted what Nissim

Ezekiel had written in ‗In India‘ where the Cezanne slung round the neck of the poet had been a burden. perched on an ‗elephant of thought, unable to make a connection with the ground reality of everyday life in India. De Souza closed that gap between high art from Europe and the ground reality of India with her observation, „I know women like that/ and not just in paintings‟. 362

In 2016, on the contents page of Mofussil Notebook, uses this as an epigraph for one of the four sections of Mofussil Notebook. The first of the eight poems here, is

‗My Bindi‘ and celebrates her joy of choosing the right bindi, ‗full-stop of red‘,

‗asterisk of gold‘, ‗black exclamation mark‘ to match her mood. But this traditional embellishment is now more than just that:

Mark of the Hindu; fashion statement ever since Madonna took to you; symbol of wedlock or mere facial embellishment, dumb bindi, eloquent in your shapes…

My Morse code of dots and dashes, bindi, that flashes the one I wish to invite… (91)

Once again, like the young girl in ‗Giving It Back‘ whose You Tube video goes viral and she gets a ‗million likes‘, the global world of the Web/ Madonna has changed the stature of the bindi from ‗Mark of Hindu‘ to ‗fashion statement‘. Agarwal shows women benefitting and empowered by the technologies of the contemporary world.

But despite the new power avatar of the bindi, the woman‘s reproductive organs continue to punish her. ‗In Utero‘, about the female body in childbirth, is one of

Agarwal‘s early poems, first published in 1993 in Poetry India: Voices for the Future edited by H K Kaul. ‗In Utero‘ is included in the fourth section of Mofussil Notebook.

It uses strong words and describes two women with different approaches to birth. One is the poet‘s friend who ‗is a bitch/ who doesn‘t believe in contraception‘, and who

‗creeps into a tin-box‘ when she is about to deliver, and ‗the lid falls on her…‘ The poem does not spell out what happens in the tin-box, does the baby die? The images are ghoulish,

The sky recedes, the wind stops; trees turn their backs on her and walk 363

away. (92)

The poet is obviously angry with the friend for not preventing this suffering. The second woman is the friend‘s aunt, who is ‗paralysed, waist down, ever since‘ she

‗was accidentally shot in the spine‘.

. . . .Aunt created medical history when she had her kids.

Aunt felt no labour, only an ache that split here head. So is it with my friend… When the pains lash her mind splits and hieroglyphs crawl out of her cunt.(92)

Both women offer variations on the approach to childbirth, one refuses modern science and the other becomes medical history. The speaker‘s anger and horror and the pain of delivery mingle to recreate labour pain. There is no romance to the process of birth, it is not glossed over, these fecund women are not idolised and mothers, rather berated for going through the process and hurting themselves.

‗For (e) mothers‘ marks a mother‘s feelings when the son leaves home. It feels like a widowing ritual, ‗naked, tonsured, shorn‘. (Mofussil Notebook 95)

‗Manifesto‘ is a poem of six lines that pays tribute to Anna Akhmatova and Anna

Swirszczynska, two twentieth century women poets:

Two Annas teach me. Speak seldom. Shoot to kill. Never let go Of classic control Behind the veil. (96)

In ‗Pram‘ a woman‘s dependence on father, brother, husband and son is like a pram ride, through the different stages of life. But when she is sixty, they say angrily, 364

Woman, when will you learn to get up and walk?‘ She stared at her legs, frail and spindly. The wind whispered, the pine rained needles on her like confetti, the sun shone brightly. (97) ‗Ananda‘, the last poem in the section under Eunice de Souza‘s line ‗I know women like that/ and not just in paintings‘ is a tongue in cheek comment on the upper caste, upper class woman moving towards old age with a sense of

privilege and well-being, She‘ll live to be a hundred. Daughter of a Brahmin, fed The sap of books, nectar of texts, oral and written, She‘ll live to be a hundred… Osteoporosis, high B.P., Shan‘t bother her. Yoga and meditation shall cleanse her, She‘ll carry on… she‘ll transform into A tight bud, third eye, power… (98)

In the next stanza the poet says,

Believe me, this is the state To be in… Once you‘ve hit the right pitch Life is pure music… Brahmari…notes of Om Resonating between the ears. (98)

The poem is set in a particular social setting of comfortably-off people seeking health and happiness at the numerous art-of-living centres all over India. Brahmari

Pranayama is a technique of breathing making a humming sound like the bee or bhramar. As the spiel of good living takes over,

The mind visualizing, The body relaxing, She, uninhibited…smiling… She‘s downing another drink, And she‘s sure she‘s going to live 365

To be a hundred… Yes, most definitely , yes… (98)

Etymologically ‗Ananda‟, denotes bliss or happiness, the highest state of being and is rooted in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Ananda is also the name of many yoga centres, spas and the brand name for a chain of art-of-living centres. The last lines,

She‘s downing another drink, And she‘s sure she‘s going to live To be a hundred… Yes, most definitely, yes… (98) is a comment on the new nirvanas that are on offer for a certain class of women in

India today. The women that are visible in this section of the book are wives, daughters, mothers, and foremothers. Their lives, with their joys and pains, are etched by Agarwal in a controlled assessing way. Even when the first person speaker expresses rage over a friend who does not use contraception the two women, the speaker and her friend taken together give us a balanced picture. None of these poems are shrill about victimhood even though women‘s aches, at a son leaving home, or pain of childbirth, or even a smothering of packaged bliss with promises of juvenescence, all hint at an underside. ‗Rational‘ that‘s what Agarwal‘s tone is.

The last section of Mofussil Notebook has a line from Jayanta Mahapatra‘s poem,

‗The Logic‘: ‗Make me small and edible, love‟. This section is about relationships between men and women. Mahapatra‘s poem has a woman speaker, presumably the wife or woman, of an intellectual whose habitation in realms of thought that exclude her is questioned. She says, how her body, her ‗skin cups unblemished milk‘ is taken by him for succour, to ‗shatter each lonely vein with‘, and that her ‗devoted pads of flesh‘ pave the ground for his ambitions, ‗for what you strove to accomplish‘. Is this a mother speaking to her grown up son, now remote in his intellectual world, or are the lines addressed to a husband or lover who takes comfort in her body, but remains 366 distant? The absence of extraneous detail actually extends the scope of the poem.

Agarwal too has this feature in her poems __ not to shrink meanings by elaboration.

Smita Agarwal‘s first poem in this section is ‗Roots‘ where she narrates how, as a child she witnessed an animal sacrifice, a Garhwali ritual for the welfare of male offspring. This is one of those rare poems where she provides an explanatory note. It is about the local custom that is at the heart of the poem. At her grandfather‘s house in the hills, are her cousins, ‗We, Grandfather‘s sixteen sturdy seedlings … wrestle, maul, hug each other.‘ They have gathered to celebrate her newborn brother‘s

‗Unsullied sojourn through one calendar year‘.

A courtyard, greened by tulsi. Incense, chantings, The ringing of bells . . . Purohitji with chandan on his forehead, Rajyarajeshwari under her filigreed golden canopy Lamps lit to commemorate the family reunion . . . bare bodied priests sprinkle water On the ram‘s head. It nods thrice. Assents to the descent of father‘s sword Cutting clear… A red splash on my cheek… My scream drowns in the One howl of delight As the elders rejoice.

In the melee, it seems, I have misplaced my shoes, lost my cool, fogged up the mirror, wrenched roots… (101-2)

In some way the girl child, bloodied by the killing, feels a sense of dislodgement from her roots in this ceremony of the father, son and the sacrificial ram. Again, a poem where the title, the image of blood on the girl child, and the sacrificed lamb, express more powerfully than explanations and theorizations, the predicament of the daughter in a patrilineal household. 367

The poem ‗Muse‘ begins with fragments of a line from Robert Graves, ‗Muse poetry… an unaccountable product of a trance… in which the personal rhythm subdues metre‟. And this time the quote is not a line from poetry but prose. And like the prose quotation the poems in this section are discursive. The poem itself is directed at Robert Graves though he is not mentioned by name within the poem.

Graves whose view of poetry is a Romantic notion of inspiration, instinct and spontaneity and constructed from a personal mythos is in opposition to Smita

Agarwal‘s own notion of poetry as an exercise in rationalism and rooted in the real. In this poem she locates an imaginary encounter with him at a cemetery with an open grave from which plants grow. There is an allusion to his surname in such a location, but overtly it refers to his engagement with mythology, the primitive subconscious.

She tells him,

Where is it you are taking me? Snakes, scorpions, other nether world creatures live here …and from a lake of cloying ooze rises a sapless flower…This is my manna you tell me… Such sweetness chokes. This flower rarely unfurls. Buds wither…I must flee; must flee before table chair lose their haloes. (103)

Smita Agarwal holds up against this nether world of death her real world of life, which though not picturesque is nevertheless life:

Human puke, piddle and yowl should turn me on while the tv chatters like an old mother; the pressure cooker whines like an importunate lover…The heady stench of tension in an exam hall… the windows open wide… (104) She tells him,

You revisit…to revive a lover‘s quarrel… I decide I shall have nothing To do with you. But, may I ask Before we are through, are you 368

spirit, man or beast, you who choose the oddest of moments to ravish, confuse…? (104)

For Smita Agarwal the rationalist poet this is an admission of confusion, of ravishment by Graves‘s philosophy of the Muse. It also acknowledges the country of death as an area beyond science and rationalism, for what happens to the consciousness after death. Agarwal‘s rationality includes awareness of the unknown, the subconscious and the pulls of mythology. It is also able to confess to the defense mounted against death through the tactile sensations of ‗Human puke, piddle and yowl‘ the pressure cooker‘s whines, the stench of tension in an exam hall, the reassuring solidity of tables and chairs.

In the next poem titled ‗Muse II: The Road‘ she uses as metaphor the two roads of Robert Frost‘s poem, ‗The Road Not Taken‘. Here, in ‗Muse II: The Road‘

Smita Agarwal asks,

If I‘d known you‘ve lain in wait Less travelled, low road, would I Have taken the turn? (105)

It is early in the morning and the eyes still unable to see, only hears

Footfalls of fellow travellers; No more than faltering passers-by … I join the stream. (105)

She then describes this travelled road as it slowly moves… ‗construction workers‘, straggling ‗child in flimsy footwear‘, ‗vegetable vendor‘, ‗school children‘, ‗a pariah dog or two‘, ‗an old man‘,

an almost Dead man, all limbs askew, daring Maybe, his last constitutional. Then, at a curve, a house of God; At its gate the ubiquitous Madman soliloquizing … 369

Mid-afternoon ,the omnibus cruises Through the fashionable sector of town. …colonnaded arcade …women laden With large shopping bags; men In business suits, briefcases in hand. Hippies lounging… roars of youth flying past on …Honda Suzuki, Yamaha… (105-6)

Agarwal delineates a road that humanity travels by, from its pre-dawn beginnings in a semi-rural landscape to the afternoon at a metropolis. The evening shows the tramp of humanity headed towards, not home but two alternate sites, one real, historical and terrible, the other mythical and unreal ___

Five o‘clock in the evening: rush-hour. … Marching on toward A common goal__ The killing fields of Auschwitz or The waters gently lapping about the island of Avalon. In the next, and last, stanza she asks the travelled road,

Had I known you‘re lying in wait, Travelled, low road, could I have Avoided the turn? (105-6)

Unlike Frost who consciously took the road less travelled by, Agarwal suggests that she, like most people in the world joined the throng and found herself on the road more travelled. She suggests that people have no choice or foreknowledge, they simply walk with everybody else and some find themselves in the grim reality of killing fields and some in faery realms. And in hindsight she wonders if had she known, would she have chosen the less travelled road. But of the travelled road she says, ‗could I have avoided the turn‘. She debunks the idea of choice of roads. That

‗The Road‘ is a subtitle of ‗Muse II‘ suggests also the choice of road in poetic practice; the road of inward turning, subconscious searching, mythical universe of

Romantic poetry, of poetry such as Robert Graves‘s which for her, is the road she 370 wouldn‘t take. Smita Agarwal‘s poetic universe comprises the road more travelled by, the world of lived daily life. Just as Mamata Kalia brings up the incongruity of

Robert Frost‘s poem about the abundance of apples in her own life of strict rationing and shortages, in the poem ‗Against Robert Frost‘, in Tribute to Papa, Agarwal re- visions and writes back to what is today an iconic poem, ‗The Road Not Taken‘.

Agarwal wrote her doctoral thesis on Sylvia Plath. Her poem titled

‗Confessional Poem: for Sylvia Plath‘ presents

This gent full of bluster, Does it exceptionally well. Lying to younger colleagues ___ About lying with younger female colleagues __ Most of all, lying to himself, About the missus being Neurotic and suspicious…. The missus couldn‘t care less: Getting her daily fix, several times, On a daily basis, From the apartment, the maid, The soaps on her high definition LED tv, And, her cute yellow Nano car. (Mofussil Notebook 38)

Agarwal‘s poems show women being happy despite men. It is as though she were telling Plath not to take the path of misery and suicide, that men being men, women can, and do, get by, despite them. She thus counters the tradition of female angst beginning in modern Indian poetry in English with Kamala Das; the angst that had led these poets to write nostalgically of their grandmothers, for instance. Smita Agarwal‘s poem ‗Grandmothers‘ tells how both her grandmothers were married at fourteen and fifteen ‗to men already married once‘, how they ‗gave up their childhood‘

‗somewhere on the long road from native village to new home‘, how they both

Fetched water in brass pots From the river, from the nearest spring, A mile away and up, up, up A steep rugged slope. 371

Both my grandmothers Gave birth at sixteen And lost that first child…

Both my grandmothers Managed large joint families, Suffered at the hands of Illiterate and cruel housemates, Both my grandmums Usually ate after The goats and cows had been fed… The eyes of my grandmas Lighted up each time I stood first in class, Won a prize for Quizzing, Singing, Physics. Both my grandmums Would have me become an Indira Gandhi or Lata Mangeshkar…‘ (32-3)

The last stanza takes the poem to its intertextual statement when she says,

Within a span of a century I have cast off roles Assigned to grandmas. I cook when I want to I clean when I feel like Hostile people don‘t bother me. I worry of Syria Talk at length on corruption I trek, I travel, I drive, I invest I buy cars, land, jewellery, I write, Poems commemorating Grandmummies. (33)

By placing herself at the successful end of female progression, Smita Agarwal offers a perspective on grandmother poems written by her peers.

The poems by Smita Agarwal, in Eunice de Souza‘s Nine Indian Women

Poets, subsequently reprinted in her two collections, represent a range of themes. The

‗Word-worker (For Jeanette Winterson)‘ has the speaker say, words, the cocoon

I knit. Fixed forever in the Slim gap between alphabets 372

I am the saboteur, the hit-man. …I rip Off masks, bequeath new skin, Dragoon words into birthing Faces never before born. (Agarwal, Wish-granting Words, 28)

Many of Smita Agarwal‘s poems are written with reference to poets, both modern poets from the West ___ Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Sylvia Plath,

Jeanette Winterson, and, Indian poets writing in English ___ Nissim Ezekiel, Arun

Kolatkar, Jayanta Mahapatra, Eunice de Souza, as well as Indian language poets such as the Tamil Ksettreyya in ‗After Ksettreyya‘, north Indian Meera, in ‗After Meera‘, or even a folk song from the Himalayan foothills, ‗Garhwali Barahmasa‘. Not just poets, there are men such as Chatwin the traveller, and Nain Singh Rawat, the cartographer for instance, who are the dedicatees of poems such as ‗The Lie of the

Land: A Letter to Chatwin‘ and ‗The Lama‘ respectively. Unlike Meena Alexander,

Agarwal believes in poetry unburdened by endnotes. ‗The Lama‘ therefore is an exploration and discovery for the reader as well, of the person that was Nain Singh

Rawat. In Nine Indian Women Poets, Eunice de Souza says of Agarwal‘s poem ‗The

Lie of the Land: A Letter to Chatwin‘ that ‗it turns topography into a meditation on perspectives, misreadings, miscalculations in one‘s life‘. (Eunice de Souza 61)

‗Binsar Barahmasa‘ on the other hand muses on an ecosystem that is vanishing from the planet. The poem is preceded by a few lines of the Garhwali folk song of the twelve months ‗Bedu pako Barahmasa/ Naraini, kaaphal paako chaita, meri chaila…‟, that celebrates the various seasons and the berries that ripen all year. In her poem Smita Agarwal describes the forests in the region as ‗Kamadeva‘s playground‘ and that, ‗the bumble-bees, wasps, flies, gnats, /Kamadeva‘s emissaries, are busy, zipping by like aeroplanes‘. She describes the wild pear blossoms leaning on a rhododendron, 373

a quiet play of white and red, Like the sarees Santiniketan girls wear, When sending forth lilting strains of Rabindra Sangeet. (Agarwal Mofussil Notebook, (121)

The landscape has, ‗barking deer‘, the ‗brain-fever bird‘, and the ‗patrol car… with a gang of excited young policemen/ Reporting a leopard sighting on the main road‘.

(121) She recalls seeing

Yesterday, at dusk, a bright light, the size of a tennis ball, Moved with great speed over the western treeline, an asteroid, A reminder of the variety and vastness of space… Past twilight, in the pitch dark, at 7500 feet, Orion was playfully touching my nose. (121)

The poem is set in a context similar to Meena Alexander‘s “Morning Ritual” and other poems (Shimla cycle) in Birthplace With Buried Stone (2013) composed during a month in the summer of 2010 when Alexander stayed at the Viceregal Lodge in

Shimla. She writes in her note on the poem, how, ‗Other places are also evoked in this cycle of poems: the Lodi gardens in Delhi, where I used to live; Bryant Park, a place I love in New York City; Sendai in Japan, which I could only imagine‘. (Alexander

125) In ‗Binsar Barahmasa‘, in Mofussil Notebook, Smita Agarwal writes, after the line on the leopard sightings,

No electricity, no running water in the taps, You not there…. …. In this forest rest house in the middle of nowhere, Reading Bill Bryson‘s ― A Walk in the Woods‖ by candlelight…‘(121) how a local person tells her of the rhododendron blooming in December last year, and comments,

The sad effects of climate change, global warming, Screwing up bio-rhythms… Will there be a day we won‘t have any seasons? (122)

374

She visualizes a day when the seasons will not come and there will be ‗one standard season, / Heat sucking out the life of grasses and plants‘ and there will be,

Poets, out of work, Having said all on this unvarying season, Nostalgic of their juvenilia ditties written, When the Earth moved And the seasons turned… (122)

Thus the American wild of Bryson, Tagore‘s Nature lyrics and Santiniketan, the

Garhwali Barahmasa, are in danger of extinction, of becoming ‗juvenilia ditties from the earth‘s past‘. Agarwal‘s rational vision for poetry does not allow her to simply celebrate but see things in a larger perspective. This gives her poetry the element of control.