Somewhere in Kandivali

I spent the entire day today waiting for poetry. Three books of poetry. These were shipped by Paperwall in Bombay. Although the India Post website has not updated the fate of the poetry since July 31st, I was confident that I would receive them today. After all, they had been posted on July 30th. However, the poetry did not reach me. And by end of day today, the tracking update is still stuck at Kandivali sorting office. If I don’t receive them by tomorrow, I can only contact Paperwall on Monday since they don’t work on weekends.

My heart is all kinds of sad about this. I was waiting the entire week in gleeful anticipation of returning home to a poetry parcel and when it did not come in yesterday, I told myself that it would definitely reach me today. That was not to be. Like I said, sad.

So, let me distract myself and tell you about my trysts with poetry and about my accidental discovery of Paperwall one feverish dawn when I found myself in a frantic quest for Eunice de Souza’s work.

I was faintly made aware of my awful ignorance about all things poetry during a session on poetry writing at a writing workshop I attended in 2017. While I had heard and read a few works of Agha Shahid Ali and was vaguely aware of names such as Arundhati Subramaniam, I hadn’t really read any Indian poets in English. During the session, I was made aware of Keki Daruwala and Arvind Mehrotra. And then Eunice de Souza passed away and I learnt of her work through all the obits. I felt quite unhappy and unfortunate that it took her death for me to even hear of her work.

So, anyway, holding on to the awareness that I was missing out on some good poetry, I set about remedying it. I got Agha Shahid Ali’s most famous ‘A Country Without a Post Office’ and read it. They were great, but were not impactful enough to leave me wanting for more. I tried reading Arundhati Subramaniam, but that too did not move me. So, my poetry project lay abandoned.

I then discovered the work of Pat Schneider through The Alipore Post. Her poem ‘The Patience of Ordinary Things’ spoke to me gently and kindly. I made my sister purchase all her books for me and she carried them from the US to India. But, I did not find any of her other poetry quite as meaningful for the contexts I inhabited. I did appreciate her life’s story, her lived experiences of trauma and the mentoring support she provides to other people in their quest to heal. But, still, it did not fuel me into doing too much with her work and my enthusiasm for poetry slowly fizzled out.

It saw a brief spurt of resurgence when I stumbled upon Michael Creighton’s sweet little New Delhi Love Songs and I wondered if this was all there was to it and wishing there was more poetry about things that I identified with. But, I couldn’t find more.

Until I discovered Akhil Katyal. And boy, did his work grab me in a joyful embrace and speak to me in the way that I longed to be spoken to. May be it is because his work is such a sharp commentary on the politics of today. May be it is because his oeuvre mainly comprises Indo-Pak relations, and the urbanity of a city like Delhi – all presented in an easily relatable mix of Hindi and English, which are all of the things that I hold close to my heart. Especially now. Especially, in these so very very troubling times that frequently reduce me to a crying mess about where we stand as a country today. And Akhil knows how to wrap all of this in a pithy verse or two, which he then proceeds to make so generously available on Twitter and Instagram. Whatever, the reasons, Akhil Katyal has opened the floodgates of poetry to me. He is the Amit Trivedi of poetry for me. I am such a fan.

His book ‘How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross’ is the first poetry book that I have wholeheartedly enjoyed and immersed myself in for days on end. I stalk and screenshot his work on Instagram and compulsively re-read them. I take pictures of verses from his book to send to people. None of them appreciate either poetry or him in the least, but I needed to tell someone about all of the awesomeness, right?

These days, I frequently change my WhatsApp profile pictures with verses from poetry that I enjoy and these are usually Akhil’s work. I feel such joy in sharing his poems and introducing people to his works.

After Akhil, I enthusiastically set about tracking more contemporary Indian poetry in English. I purchased Amit Chaudhuri’s new book. This was available on Kindle. It wasn’t much to write home about. Then Arundhati Subramaniam’s recently released work received a lot of press. This too was available on Kindle and I bought it. Again, it left me cold.

Then, I suddenly remembered Eunice de Souza. Oh, there she was on Kindle too. I got her ‘Necklace of Skulls’. But, uh oh, this one had none of the zing that poems from her obit had carried. Where were those poems? I woke up in the wee hours of the day one morning frantically wondering where I could get those poems, one of which was about a falling almond leaf.

Amazon said that her collection ‘Learn from the Almond Leaf’ was out of stock sending me into a state of panic. I looked outside of Amazon and that is when I discovered Paperwall in Bombay. The book was very much available, but because Paperwall is an independent publisher and distributor, they retail it through their own site. Sighing with relief, I placed an order for the book and when it reached me after four days, I was delighted. The hunt and the wait had been worth it. I loved almost every one of her verses in this collection and like Akhil’s work, I return to them very often.

It is almost as if any poetry I am bound to like does not come in the easily available instant gratification of a Kindle version. I am made to place an order and then wait in feverish anticipation for it to be delivered.

Which is how I am obsessing over Kandivali, Mumbai right now. Eunice de Souza led me to Paperwall and I went back to their site to browse their other collections. On Sunday, I ordered three books that I wanted to sample. The first time around when I had ordered Eunice de Souza’s book, I had to email them to ask about the status of my order since I did not hear back from them with the tracking number. They are an independent agency, and hence I did not fret about it at all, given that their operation scale must be very small. Moreover, I was happy that I was buying from an indie store instead of a biggie like Amazon. Paperwall promptly replied with the tracking number and I got my book on time.

But, now it has been a whole 5 days and my India Post is still stuck in Kandivali where it was posted. Since I have been dealing a lot with India Post lately, I know that their tracking updates are not always reliable. A letter I sent to Jaipur has still not updated its status even though it has been two months since it has been delivered and received. Hence, I can only hope that my parcel has reached Bangalore and I will hopefully receive it tomorrow. The rains have also been pretty disruptive in Bombay and I wonder if that is the reason for the delay. In which case, I do hope my package reaches me safe and sound.

Please, oh please, let me get all of my poetry tomorrow.

I do hope you will explore some of Eunice de Souza, Michael Creighton and the fabulous Akhil Katyal. I am so happy to have them all in my life even as I wait for more poetry to arrive and discover.

If you, dear reader, have any suggestions for me that you think I might enjoy, please do let me know.

Meanwhile, please pray for Kandivali to release my poetry quickly.

Finding poetry

I waited for poetry today, but it did not come my way so I went looking for it, but returned empty handed all the same. This is the proper words waala poetry, not the metaphoric kind of poetry that one finds in random moments. I am in dire need of poetry in the traditional sense of the term right now, but since it refuses to happen, I can only surmise that perhaps, sometimes, unless you already acknowledge the poetry that a short while ago, had enveloped you in its profoundness, newer verses may not find their way to you. So, this is an attempt to remedy that.

In an earlier post, I had written about listening to Mann kasturi re while reading the lyrics of the song. It is by far the most well written song for me from this year. What I did not write about at that time was another line that wasn’t part of any of the songs in Masaan, but which I found thanks to the film. I had at that time turned the lines over and over in my head marveling at the sheer force of its thought and how sometimes I too have taken a leap of faith based on nothing more than audacious optimism. I wish these lines had been there with me in those moments, it would have made those leaps far less terrifying. These lines are by Dushyant Kumar. I found them here and they said,

Kaun kehta hai ke aasmaan main suraakh ho nahin sakta,
ek patthar toh tabiyyat se ucchhalo yaaron.

Even if the ideas are common, poetic thoughts in languages other than English often resonate and appeal to me more simply because it is not the language of my everyday. I hold on to them and remember them for long after so much so that I can recite them verbatim – something that does not happen to me with thoughts that are expressed in English which is the language I am most fluent in be it reading, writing, or speech. The very nature of the ‘foreignness’ of languages like Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi and the unexpected contexts of encountering them are personally valuable to me because I wouldn’t know where to go looking for them if the onus were on me to find them because I don’t know enough about the tongue. So sometimes, when I do meet these verses, I find myself more vulnerable to their messages and what they have to say. Not only do I not know the first thing about poetry, I am also not interested enough in poetry to pick up a book of verses and read by myself. Hence, whenever poetry happens to me, I feel like these fleeting encounters that I have with verses in the midst of my prosaic life embody what the true essence of poetry anyway is – to create small embroidered pockets of restfulness that are threaded together by the prettiest combination of thoughts and words to usher in meaning that lights up your heart. It is why I love Hindi film songs so much. Their lyrics set to tunes offer me a short cut to poetic thoughts that I am only too happy to receive.

These lines by Dushyant Kumar have little to do with why I need poetry right now, but I feel I must record and acknowledge this because serendipity sending poetry my way is my only hope and perhaps this will appease whoever is in charge of these things.

P.S. I find my school education a tragic waste of my time. While it equipped me with the rudimentary basics of literacy, there seems to have been much that I missed out on. Chief of which is a rather underwhelming experience of learning about both Hindi and Marathi literature that were the regional languages I learnt in school. Why weren’t we introduced to thoughts such as these that occurred to poets like Dushyant Kumar? Why, after spending grades I-X studying Marathi and grades V-X studying Hindi can I not even think of blogging in any of these languages? I made a last ditch attempt to learn to read and write Tamil in my last five months in the United States and am semi-literate in my mother tongue now, but that is all. I spent three months learning to read and write Kannada when I moved to Bangalore, but I have forgotten much of that too because I did not keep up with practice and the alphabets are back to being squiggles that confuse me in my attempts to distinguish one from another. What a waste of time spent in school. So much so for coming from a country that boasts of linguistic diversity.

P.P.S. There are a couple of lines from my grade X Marathi text book which are the only ones I ever remember and something that I will never forget because the story of Phulvedya Mai (A lady who was mad about flowers) had a question as poetic as this – “Yevdhushya mannala jhapaycha tari kiti?” This heart so little; how much can one control its desires?
Another line in this story went – “Vede vha, vha thode vede. Nehmi shahane rahnyat, kai shahanpan aahe?”  Be mad. Be a little mad. What is the wisdom in always being so wise?

Touche. Poetry.

Love as work, Work as love

A ‘thank you’, to the lovely Natasha Badhwar who enriches everyone by sharing so much of her family’s conversations, smiles, laughter, tears, embarrassments, arguments, fights, sulks, and life through her columns and Facebook posts. These lines from Faiz came my way today courtesy a conversation that she shared on Facebook. It landed smack dab in the middle of my analytical quest to firm up the slush of codes and categories into the poetry of academic prose. I tucked the hair behind my ears to make just a little bit more visible the Mughal queen who lends a touch of whimsy to my workday today and smiled at the incompleteness of it all.

Woh log bahut Khush-qismat the
Jo ishq ko kaam samajhte the
Ya kaam se aashiqii karte the

Hum jeete-jee masroof rahe
Kuchh ishq kiya, kuchh kaam kiya
Kaam ishq ke aaRe aata raha
Aur ishq se kaam ulajhta raha

Phir aaKhir tang aakar humne
Dono’n ko adhoora chhoR diya