Going through the hundred-odd poems in Window With a Train Attached by C.P. Surendran, I remembered the American poet Robert Frost’s admonition: “Writing poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net.” Or, for that matter, what game can one play without a net? I wonder. Hopscotch and gulli-danda spring effortlessly to the mind.
On reading the celebrated Adil Jussawala’s recommendation to read the book, I take a deep dive, but fail to come up trumps when I find neither “the paradoxical nature of wounding – both inflicted and curative – better expressed.”
Below that is Jerry Pinto’s blurb, who declares these as “incantations muttered by a profaned priest, using memory to rake the soul of the heart.” Granted that the poems travel huge distances… For me, the only way forward is to ride on a train. In this book, the only picture that will take you anywhere is the one the publishers have used on the cover. Excellent image that.
In another poem entitled Ash, the roots of the mango tree, under whose shade the poet’s father wrote ‘gibberish’ in the evening of his life, are threatening the old homestead and must be brought down, as they are undermining the house. Chopped up, the logs are stacked, but they are too fresh to use for firewood. The wood-cutters chit-chat: “Now that the roots are dead, your house is safe. This wood’s all fire: It’s too young to light.” It is still a mystery to me why the poet looks up at the sky, and somehow, suddenly, out of the blue, he finds “the sun very close, very white.”
Am I being too quick at the draw? Wait! There’s a glimmer of hope, in the four-line poem entitled Garden, after all, ‘ground’ does rhyme with ‘bound’, but try as much as I cannot see how line one’s end-word ‘sun’ can rhyme with line three’s last word ‘wind’! No mid rhyme either.
Oh! How I wish I were not a fuddy-duddy romantic who believes that: “Poetry begins with a homesickness or a love sickness, like a lump in the throat that ends after a series of lucky coincidences, and ends with a clarification of life!”
Then on other pages, there’s Delhi: Killer Squad, where we find “October stalks Delhi’s ruins, where kings sat on thrones.” The next line loses it with “the day short, the noon white, the evening yellow, damp.” Suddenly, it’s like “the hair of death. Parul, Paddy, Anil, my friends are bones.” Mercifully, the poet hastens home in the twilight for “the close to his heels, the big hair vamp.” How, please don’t ask me!
“I have never seen the paradoxical nature of wounding – both inflicted and curative – better expressed,” says Adil Jussawala. Where is it? I wonder, as I set out to look for it, I found little that was either.
“I am nearly not here”, there is “a memory of yesterday troubles a remembered prayer from an eternally dying fire. Soul, soul, /why do you persecute me? The road to Damascus/Disperses lines in France’s sea of wines.” Whatever happened to the good-old desi symbols? I sometimes wonder why poets continue to hobble on what is so obviously obscure or foreign-sounding. Why use names like ‘Damascus, London, and Brussels!’
Wouldn’t it be close to home if you read epics like the Mahabharat or the Ramayana? Or if you’re less religiously inclined, there are always fables from the Panchtantra or the Jataka. If you have to use a stick to lean on, could it be related to Indian folklore? They are closer to home and not so remote.
No poet can continue with ghosts of imitations or continue to be swept off their feet solely by any Western luminary.
Fifty-odd years later, I admit to getting goosebumps remembering Western poetry. There is T.S. Eliot, who took from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad to round off his post-war epic, The Waste Land. Just momentarily let us remember what he said in those immortal lines: ‘Thus spake the Thunder Da, da, da.’ Datta, Dayadhavam, Damyata. Shanti, Shanti, Shanti. Thunder is the voice of god, or an angel, and a powerful force in nature.