HYDERABAD: The book title ‘A Clock in the Far Past’ casts a long shadow down an alley that splinters into different lanes and bylanes leading to arresting images of nostalgia, sense of a home, arrival to a child’s world and to a subtle fabric that sways and sways producing yarns ‘in a room/marooned between dream/and deep dream.’ Poet Sarabjeet Garcha has preened the images, polished, sunned and varnished them to the effect of pictorial story books that glaze and glaze taking the reader inside a little boy’s satchel, a train crossing a misty river, wisps rising from a grandfather’s bidi. The book takes the reader on a nostalgia trip. But it’s more than that – it invites the reader to a quest for more questions that have made a home deep within him ready to travel to the skies and beyond.
This longing of something distant results in a tonality which is intriguing, inviting. The metaphors offer a sense of urgency offering an invitation to explore the cadence held within the words that splash across the vast white pages leaving impressions that rise till the point where vision surrenders. This is ‘a building with no architect’ as the poet engages the reader in the construction and steps aside. That’s how we have lines like:
All we’ve inherited
is an endless desert,
but I’ve learnt
to swap dreams,
The melting landscape leads the eye to ‘The Door’ where bodies gently collapse like ‘walking into a cinema’ through a ‘pristine glass door’. Where is the poet traversing? Or is it the poem travelling from one dimension to another, one body to the next, one ism to another? At the exit of this journey he lets ‘the dusk in your heart/glow into the dawn…’ that settles in ‘a world very close to the heart.’ This world appears and disappears as ‘a new home every moment’ – a home inhabited, forsaken for another home. The poet catches the shaft of sunlight between them. This patch illuminates the gentle sway, the karigari of the knots, the colours within, that brighten up when he puts a magnifying glass above them.
They come alive and converse. And it’s a conversation between the moments. The transience. The momentary. The custody of this fragility, its constant struggle with flesh to become a mere story, a few stanzas is what Sarabjeet achieves which makes the book unputdownable, a delight to be savoured again and again. A story ‘born from stories’. A song that slips from the lips to make its home in the heart.
Available on Amazon.in
Publisher: Dhauli Books
Price: `250