Verses of sunset
HYDERABAD: “Poetry is communication with your ‘self’”, says poet Hoshang Merchant who is as old as India’s Independence and is as beautiful as the metaphors and images of his poems that feature in his new book – ‘My Sunset Marriage’ published by Navayana. In the book his poems talk about saints, cities, seas and change the course to boy-love, poems for maestroes like Ghalib, Faiz and Jibananada maturing into verses pertaining to Sufism. His life exhales poetry that the pages are splashed with. A lookalike of Walt Whitman, he adjusts the glasses on the bridge of his nose and reads from the book while in a conversation with poet Nabina Das and his former student Akshaya Rath.
The poems in the book follow a chronological pattern. There are 101 poems. But why 101? Because Zoroastrian God has 101 names. The Anglophone poet takes an iconoclastic avatar in his works. He explores countries, relationships and definitions of love. The title of the book reflects his open gay identity. He shares why it was named so, “It’s poet Kazim Ali who selected the title.” The words are from his poem ‘Return to My Native Land’. He adds, “It’s about marriages in our Parsi community that take place after sundown. After Parsis landed in India in 13th century, they made a pact with the king about the wedding time.”
The title is a metaphorical suggestion for gay marriages. And this is not just the gay poet you see in several poems talking about men-and-men love, he explores the flare between Birth and Death through Sufism. That’s why in ‘Reading of Rumi’ one comes across lines like ‘Each day is death’. He loves Siraj Aurangabadi the way that poet-turned-Sufi renounced poetry after having been forsaken by a lover. He chuckles, “Sufis aren’t straight men. Physical love doesn’t last longer. It’s the spiritual love that is the ultimate.” One also gets subtle traces of Shamanism in these works. Hoshang insists that he’s closer to Sufism but appreciates Shamanism, “Red Indian tribes are Shamans. My sister Whabiz on her trips to Arizona and New Mexico met them. Many in such tribes are homosexuals. One tribe, Navago, values homosexuals much. When there is any calamity these people give away their ration storage and take care of other’s children.”
The poet’s sister Whabiz Merchant loved his poems and even used to tell him how deeply sadness is seated in them. That’s how one sees many poems in the collection devoted to her. After her death, Hoshang stopped writing. But what does he do when the poems come calling? He sighs and shares, “Whatever is lost in poetry, I write down in prose.”
The way Frida Kahlo in her self-portrait ‘The Broken Column’ painted her body sealed with nails and other keen objects, he too, feels the same but doesn’t express the same in the language of poetry. His personal pain becomes universal in the lines: ‘Every poet is a Jew’ in the poem ‘Jew’. He says, “I will take side with Palestine if it’s about their oppression. When Hitler’s servant girl, who became pregnant by him, saw the dictator and buried her child – this is pain.” There’s revolt in the poems. A call for change. There’s no plea. And even after years when the society refuses to accept same-sex relationships a need for revolution arises. “Revolution is when I say that I love a man and a whole generation accepts it,” ” he says with a firm face.