Anindita Sengupta

Given my current situation (and seductions) in life, I thought this was appropriate. It’s been a month since I got to England and barring one week of illness and a few days of being snowed in, it’s been exciting. Actually, the illness and the being snowed in were probably useful because I got some work done.

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Serendipity: A was in Berlin three weeks back and we met at Paris for a very hectic four days. The Louvre is overwhelming in a way that leads to despair. After walking around for about ten hours, we accepted that at least a month was required to see everything. We didn’t have a month. We had just a day and we had to concede defeat. There was so much to love but discovery-wise, Chardin was interesting. The Musee D’Orsay is much more manageable than the Louvre and one of the things I liked most there was Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Four Parts of the World. I also loved The Orangerie, which has a much smaller collection but is beautifully located inside the Jardin des Tuileries. The rooms full of Monet’s Nympheas or Water Lilies are exciting and serene at the same time.

Okay, I’m not going into what else we did (the Eiffel, a river tour, walks along the Seine etc) and ate (scallops, escargots, crepes, cheese, pain au chocolat) because this is not a travel guide and Paris is not little talked about. There was also an embarrassing episode at a strip-show where we got conned but I won’t get into that either. I did feel a sort of helplessness about all the things we couldn’t find time for.  Every now and then, we had to remind ourselves that this was Paris, a city that can’t really be enjoyed in a guided-tour, monument-hopping way. We prioritised leisurely walks and meals over one or two important sights and adopted Indian fatalism about visiting again soon.

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British poet Drew Milne came to read at the university. You can see his work here and here. What do you think? I’m still trying to make up my mind about it. Frankly, my first reaction was not intense. But maybe, I’ll change my mind. I don’t know.

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There was a guest lecture about ecopoetries in America. The speaker went on a bit about Americans and their special relationship to their land. It made me think about our relationship to our land. Especially now that we see it disappearing under construction rubble in cities like Bangalore. It also made me think about some of Ramanujan’s poems, especially A River which has these lovely lines:

People everywhere talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.

And these…

He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year

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I haven’t taken too many pictures in London yet, mainly because I’ve been busy doing other things like being completely turned on, obsessed and orgasmic — to continue with the seduction trope — about the Poetry Library. I can’t really explain how moving it is to be in a library devoted to poetry. And they allow you to read and borrow books for free. I know I sound like I want to squeal with joy. But I felt like Gretel finding that magic house made of chocolate and candy in the woods. Minus the witch.

I’ve also been busy visiting more museums, spending time with an old friend and watching movies. Also, Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour made my birthday pretty special.

But here is a gull looking at the Thames. Doesn’t he look like he’s thinking hard?

This is at one remove–a substitute
For final answers. But the wise man knows
To cleave to the one living absolute
Beyond paraphrase, and shun a shrewd repose.

~ Derek Mahon, Preface to a Love Poem

Impossible to look directly into
another’s eyes. Impossible to look
into your own. You read the dense book
of being like a document you flick through.

~ George Szirtes, Rough Guide

The entry is the usual narrow lane crammed with shops selling kadas, rudraksha necklaces, brass artifacts, flowers, garlands, sweets. Jumbles of colour. Women haggling over fake gold rings. Boys clanging dekchi lids. Frothy lassi being poured into glasses. The lane opens out suddenly into a temple compound, a clear white space. Neat counters where you can keep shoes or get prasad. An automatically replenishing puddle for people to wash their feet. And a small shrine of Durga. Through a gate is the main temple. It’s built in the middle of a lake.

And it’s very gold-infused.

On a weekday morning, it’s relatively quiet. A few boys clang the bells with more enthusiasm than devotion warrants and a Bengali family stands around, commenting on…well, everything. I find it amazing how Bengali travelers are everywhere, jabbering on in Bangla, confident that nobody understands and therefore indulging in happy, private conversations, mostly about food.

The idols in the inner sanctum glitter fiercely gold. I find it hard to muster up devotion for gods who look like wealthy businessmen kids dressed up for their own wedding. In front of them, two children — a boy and a girl — sit on makeshift thrones, dressed up as gods. They look like they have to sit there all morning, possibly all day, squirming in their prickly, fake-gold crowns, their flaming orange outfits. Bengali woman says to daughter who looks about eight: See Radha-Krisha! Do you want to be? Radha-Krishna? Daughter looks utterly bemused.

I walk around the temple, looking at the beautiful doors and some very interesting statues enclosed in glass which depict scenes from the Ramayana.

At the back, I find Shiva. He’s spouting water from his head and this, I now realise, is what is supposedly creating the lake. The Ganges in miniature. A friendly priest says I must have the holy water. He looks pained that I can even consider not doing so. I frown and think of dead fish and human spit. I like Shiva. I really do. He’s the coolest in the pantheon. But I’m sure he’ll forgive me my fussy drinking habits.

Outside, the temple guard looks disturbed when I’m about to leave. It turns out I haven’t seen the other temple, the Durga temple. This must be what the place gets its name from. He points me down a narrow lane, looking pleased at having done his good deed for the day. The lane smells vaguely of cow dung and construction debris but is relatively clean. This temple is simpler, nicer somehow. There’s something stark about the trishul as an object of worship.

There is a gigantic tree in the courtyard, encircled with yards and yards of red and yellow string, years of prayer wound around it like a noose. At the back, there are two large walls covered with story panels on Hanuman’s life. Quite a labour of love.

On my way back through the lane, I pass a large room which seems bare and purposeless, almost a place for the priests to generally hang out. In one of the alcoves, a girl sits studying the scriptures. She looks very peaceful. And perhaps,
she is.

There were fields, lots of them; fields yellow with mustard flowers very reminiscent of the movies, fields burning in neat squares of orange flames. Also trees, roadside markets, men sitting on charpoys, men sleeping at bus stops, funny film posters, and a ridiculous number of shops selling ‘English Wine and Beer’. As opposed to ‘desi’ I suppose because, of course, English is synonymous with foreign. (That’s turning out to be quite the theme of my month, by the way.)  I didn’t see any water bodies, which saddened me because I love water bodies.

For some time, a woman with two kids came and sat down next to me. With both kids. One in her lap and the other squashed between us. I tried to think kind thoughts about the goodness of children and so on but it was quite uncomfortable to sit like that, four people on two seats, and I was relieved when they moved to other seats.

There was another woman with a tiny baby just across the aisle and there was much crying and feeding activity going on. The man next to her looked so indifferent to both of them that I was quite surprised when she tapped his arm at their stop and he left with them. Daddy, I guess.

Jalandhar is a major stop on the route and most people got off there. I almost got off too because I asked someone if we had reached Amritsar already and this person said yes. Anyway, the bus driver, a gruff old Sardarji, looked at me as if I was daft when I went up to the front. Understandably. Then he growled ‘Amritsar is two hours away’.  Then he went on to ask me if someone was picking me up at the bus station since I was reaching at 10.30 pm, insisted that it was not safe for me to take a cab from there, insisted that I call the hotel and get them to send a taxi and paced about until I had sorted this out. Through all this, he maintained customary gruffness of expression and voice.

Not to generalise and all that, but yeah, Sardarji completely lived up to the famed Punjabi reputation for friendliness despite the gruff exterior.

The incident also reminded me of a conversation I had with someone about the kindness of strangers. She’s a reluctant traveler and was quizzing me about how I manage ‘all alone’. I casually said I’ve always been lucky enough to find nice strangers whenever I needed help. ‘But isn’t that a bit risky,’ she asked, ‘to trust strangers.’ And of course it is, now that I think about it.

The truth is I’m always getting into situations while traveling. (See here and here and I haven’t even gone into how I landed up in Jo’burg with way less money than I had planned to carry…I forgot one pouch at home. So that was just plain careless but we’ll let it go. Okay? Okay. ) But so far, I’ve always been lucky in unexpected ways. Random acts of kindness, the mercy of strangers, that sort of thing.

I don’t have any logical reason or rules for this really. Except that sometimes, one has to take help from any quarters. And as we move around more and more, strangers are often our only bet. (Vaguely related is this 2008 study that the world is, in general, trusting strangers more and more as evinced by the rise of social media.)

Also, the greatest betrayals sometimes come from the closest people so you can never be too safe in any case.

Note: I’m not recommending that anyone run out and hitchhike across India or befriend random people on the streets and so on.

I’ve been thinking about the intense, complex energies of South Africa which were spectacularly on display at the festival. What I found most fascinating about Poetry Africa was the diversity of the types of poetry, which ranged from rap / slam to poetry with music and quieter ‘page’ poetry. It was interesting because the old argument of ‘what is poetry’ starts kicking about in lively fashion in a place where a bunch of poems look totally unlike each other. At one poet’s forum (called an ‘indaba‘), it got a bit heated as seventeen different poets debated definition, purpose and aesthetics with the full knowledge that these debates can never reach any definite conclusion but are important to have in any case. Something new to me — apparently there are some South African poets using their poetry in advertisements and there were some charged debates about the ethics of commercialising poetry with some poets denouncing it and others justifying it with the argument that ‘if we can make money from poetry, why not?’ One rather surprising viewpoint was: ‘We are all selling something anyway — our opinions, our values etc — so why not shares or soap?’ Well, I’d rather be ‘selling’ my own opinions than somebody else’s soap. But to each his own?  Of course, I’m also curious to know what the quality of soap-selling poetry would be.

The festival ran for an entire week with poetry readings and performances every evening. These lasted about three hours and attracted substantial crowds which I found amazing considering that here, when we get 50 people for a reading, we are ready to drop to our knees in thanksgiving. Poets performed in English, Afrikaans, Isizulu, French, Portuguese and Turkish. There was a strong element of protest in some of the poetry. Some of us currently writing English poetry in India tend to avoid rousing political statements so it was a shake-up to experience a culture where statements are still common, even expected, in poems. I tend to be wary of agenda-driven poetry, mostly because I think a lot of it is just plain bad. There’s a tendency to fall back on the power of the emotion or situation and not bother with the craft. At the same time, our political beliefs do inform who we are as people, and as a natural outcome, what and how we write. And I did hear some good-brilliant protest poetry. I suppose the question to ask with any poem — political or otherwise — is whether it’s a strong poem as opposed to (merely) being a strong statement. It was wonderful that many of us agreed on some of the things that make a strong poem: complexity of thought, musicality of language, specificity, sensory detail.

At a more personal level, it was fantastic to be among so many poets. The eccentric energies, the insecurities, the plain oddness that often make me worry about being let loose in public seemed to have found their correct roosting place, almost like coming home. Okay, on that dreadfully sentimental note (many of us also agreed that sentiment is to be abhorred in poetry), I will stop and give shout-outs to some of my festival favourites, people whose work I loved. So in no particular order:

Liesl Jobson who is editor of the South Africa section of Poetry International Web. She writes poetry, short stories and flash fiction. Her work is wry and biting, quietly powerful and elegantly crafted. There’s strong imagery and great sonic effects. And she talks about the heavy stuff with subtlety. You can read one of her poems here and here is an extract from the poem ‘Zulu Love Letter’ which is in her latest collection View from an Escalator. It’s a longish poem that talks about motherhood, memory and the threat of loss at a personal level but manages to set this against the larger context of what’s happening in her nation without seeming contrived. I’ve picked my favourite stanza:

Each night counting these glass fragments under my fingernails
I remember Ma’Msomi’s valley where AIDS swallows
children, spits up mounds of rusty earth without headstones
and try to remember that custody battles are not terminal.

Loftus Marais writes in Afrikaans and his debut collection Staan in die algemeen nader aan vensters has picked up a number of awards. His poems sound wonderful when read aloud and I loved the translations I read though I’m sure the originals are better. You can read one of the translations here (though it’s one of his shorter poems). Here’s a youtube recording of a reading and I will post another translation here soon if I can.

Lesego Rampolokeng’s work churns with a furious energy and watching him perform is really an experience. As a person, he’s as frank, no-holds-barred and intense as he is while performing so it’s also quite an experience  to interact with him. Here’s a poem you can read and another, and here is a feature on him.

And Jennifer Ferguson whose voice is electric, and who is also (and as importantly) a fabulous woman. Listen to her here. Or visit her myspace page for most recent stuff.