HYDERABAD: The glass walls in Urvashi Bahuguna’s ‘Terrarium’ collapse into million of drops each balancing a world on its globule making way for the reader to step inside the private garden which breathes within her heart. A closer look and you realise, it’s not just one garden, there are several glistening with their green within. The light flitting through broad dark leaves leads you to discover what she does and doesn’t intend to hide.
It’s not just a causal stroll in someone’s chambers, the walk leads you to several doors through which you find carefully crafted poems opening their eyes. They meet your gaze and converse with you through the poet’s images she picks from London, Goa, Bombay and Delhi. What appeals in this collection is that her experiences act like water bringing to the beach a reader’s own experiences who sees the ships sailing away or docking to the shores forsaken long ago. But the water still gurgles somewhere. The seashells still crunch under the feet.In her debut poetry book, Urvashi has set the fleet floating and weaves their movements with tight precision almost surgical but beautiful. You hear her sculpting the sounds that’s how she knowshow to sendmoons to halo the earth…
Her earth is compartmentalized as home, exile, and sanatorium completing the trajectory of existential grief and yet becoming coherent, transforming as one. She examines her Goan connection which lies in ‘the heart of a mango’ and Mandovi Backwaters. She achieves it through‘water-washed parapets’ and trains riding into Monsoon. Sometimes the weight of the mundane life thus portrayed presses you down, but the poet arrives with a meaning asking you to look at it from different angles. The poems take you to her family dinners, fruit bowls and then to the mouth of a ‘blue god’ inside which stars and moons dance. It’s the ordinariness which becomes extraordinary.
A drop of milk becomes a bottomless pail holding secrets shared long ago by the stars. Her fascination with the clean sky resonates with the usage of erasing. Erasure of stains on skin, skirts, and shirts which blaze like bright flags on a trail of sunlight. She invites the reader to rise up and cleanse the sky and watch the show all over again only to fall in love with what Kathleen Jamie called ‘this, the only world.’
Urvashi traces the “bruised and bumpy earth” with her fingers under the gaze of her geography teacher Miss Fatima. She moves within the linguistic and mental landscape scooping out tales, pulling the yarns gently to reveal the knots and stitches that make relationships. That’s how something as unwanted as lice and their eggs find their way between the love of two sisters. In the poem ‘In search of Lice and Love’ her silver hair strand is “like a horse galloping through a quiet/moor.” The image brings the quietness of night ripe enough for tales to take over the weary hearts, tired bodies.
And behind it breathe a few broken pictures through whose gaps the reader can see the poet’s struggle with her ‘other self’; she’s tired but travels around these dark parts, polishes them, and lets them soak the raw earth. They leap at you but don’t cross the edge they are bound to. This is what connects them to one another as they become the narrative of the book making readers reconnect with themselves and their relationships. And all this in the middle of different flowers and plants is what adds to the charm. Urvashi pins them in strings to her poems. The beautiful cover speckled with leaves and petals indicates what the reader can discover inside. It’s a delightful collection penned by an anxious but beautiful mind.
Available on Amazon.inPublisher: The Great Indian Poetry Collective Price: `350
saima@newindianexpress @Sfreen