A SAARC poetry festival
Bharathi Devi's mail smelt of a complaint. I hadn't written, hadn't called, and hadn't done anything since I got back from Bhubaneswar. Bharathi, the nightingale from Karnataka, was a schoolteacher and a poet who believed in revisions. Her poem 'Taimur' had gone through at least ten rounds of revision while most would be attempting to write the next poem and paint the next page. She also had a voice that demanded the attention of even the most vocal bunch of sixty-four poets, thirty-four of whom were from Orissa. Bharathi was indeed a bridge. And with her help, I ended up without having to suffer the severe bouts of fibromyalgia - painful muscle-tightening of the back - that long distance travel otherwise triggers off in me. What cures it is simple rest. That has been difficult all my life except this one time I'm writing about now, where no discomfort was experienced despite daily bus travels for over five hours to distant places, eating out of "kolapata" platters, drinking tea in plastic cups, and having to use public toilets. It also speaks volumes about the therapeutic powers of poetry!
This rare opportunity came my way when I was asked to participate in a SAARC poetry festival in Bhubaneswar, Puri, Konark and Cuttack organized by FOSWAL (Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature), New Delhi. My first surprise came in the form of a plain, unassuming print which was slipped into my palms by an Oriya poet right after I arrived on Feb 22 at the Suryansh Hotel in Bhubaneswar. Soubhagyanta Maharana, a young man in his 30's, a manager of an insurance company in Orissa, had his English translations by Jayanta Mahapatra ready to be shared with the rest of us:
Ah! Around me is a crowded procession
Of corpses with firebrands,
Demanding their right to live
Amidst the strange din of skeletons
By the time I came to the last line, it was time for Ms.Ajeet Caur, the president of FOSWAL, to speak. The stage was set: the Governor of Orissa had spoken and scholars like Dr.Sitakanta Mahapatra had talked about chasing the bird of poetry for 40 years. Then came our turn. The Nepali poet, Manu Manjil, began with his own translation of a poem that speaks of ownership and rights to land:
Don't come, I said
The city abounds in troubles
Streets here stab and shock
The dream walker's steps…
The city, I said, is ungenerous to life….
Manu draws clean portraits of the City screaming at daybreak, crows perching on its shoulders, being half awakened to "write poem". That is a true voice of a Nepali poet who watches the disappointments of his country in transition, and has trouble looking straight into the mirror. While I was trying to side with Manu's picture, the lovely Bharathi Devi from Karnataka carried her soul in her poetry and wanted a poetic corner of her own:
When the pressure cooker hoots
When mustard bursts in the burning oil
when milk boils over the vessel…
And when those dreams seek a space to paint their riot of
shades
The desire to have a room of my own
Swells within me.
The next surprise was a Ms. Srebanti Ghosh from Kolkata who, with her impassioned verses, had stirred up enough controversy amongst the audience by using the word 'masturbation' in her poetry. The Oriya poets boycotted her; the rest of the crowd sat in supportive silence. Yet Srebanti was fearless when it came to expressing herself:
This house smells only of males, even the chomrie,
The old mattress, also the batasa for homage
…The male incarnated pillars, the Natamandir, the iron door,
Those helots hiding at the end of the stairs, stale and foul,
Fed on leftovers…
But I soon realized that it does take a Satchin Ketkar, a young lecturer at Baroda University, to tame the audience. In Puri, right after the team had visited the Sun Temple, and had undergone a few guide sessions on 12th century eroticism, Satchin had written a poem that drew graphic details of the chariot on sun dials and of the greed and passion of kings. The audience clapped while he recited the poetry; the Oriyas, the rest of India and SAARC together. Yet poor Srebanti got singled out for rebuke for using a single, simple word? Satchin has edited a lovely anthology of Marathi poems which lists the contemporary poets writing in vernacular. I played around with the collection for almost over an hour and decided to ask him if he had ever feared readers' response.
His instant response hit my gut: "Only poets read poetry, don't they?"
They do, indeed and therefore, Satchin's 'Spam' had a gripping effect on yours truly:
My Norton protected soul
Proves toothless to retaliate
Like some mutant fish
Struggling on a hook
Poets like Angshuman Kar from Kolkata also displayed a deviant voice when he writes:
1996:
BPL. Large. Color set. When purchased for home, for the first time I began thinking we're also getting rich-men-like. Sourav's century I saw, Anaida's album, films on Star Movies. Mom became an addict, a movie worm of various serials, but Dad only of cricket and old films on Zee cinema - of the sixties-seventies - the Hindi films with dishoom-dushoom.
2000
Dad passed away.
A poet friend had said earlier that South Asia boasts of contradictions. While bombs are dropped, we celebrate survival. In our lands, guns and roses, rags and riches, fair and foul all live cheek to jowl. While lovers make love, a young poet from Tamil Nadu, Venilla, writes:
A tremor…
Mating ends in smoke
Anar, a young Muslim woman from Sri Lanka, had paid her own air fare and for lodging to come to India just to read poetry. The ceaseless twenty-two long years of conflict has left the Sri Lankan's mind devoid of any romance. So she writes about the bloodbath in her land:
I am habituated
to the sight of blood
shed every month. Yet,
when the child comes screaming
with his finger, slashed,
I shudder in shock and suffering.
I was among poets who spoke the language that they wanted to. Verses of Shamim Reza, a young lecturer of Dhaka College, spoke of boundaries while Alfred Khokon, another Bangladeshi poet, was all about passion. Their voices, their candor in speaking about the unspeakable, and mostly, their courage in tracing the untouched terrains of torture touched all. While poetry was a walking nation, we were all fellow travelers with our backpacks and addresses etched on the common cyclostyled, spiral- bound anthology that the organizers had published.
We, the poets, shared many treats besides poetry during the festival, one of which was the Sun temple. The Chandrabhaga river right beside the temple was a delight. The architecture and the aesthetics of the temple, when explained by the tour guides, gave us all a chance to laugh out aloud while listening to the ever-overzealous guides detailing the sexual antics of 12th-13th century royalty.
Then came Ravenshaw, a college (currently university) which had been in existence since 1868 at Cuttack. That stole the show. Sitting on a bench of a Chemistry class in Cuttack, Orissa, realizing that nothing in that majestic institution was less than a hundred years old, my mini dvd recorder automatically locked in to the face of the Oriya poet Jayanta Mahapatra, who was telling the audience that a poet was not a social reformer and that in spite of the undiscovered graves, imprisonments, and killings sixty years down the line what holds true is the spirit of the poet.
He quoted Laxmi Prasad from Nepal and referred to:
Let me rise higher than the sage,
He quoted Al Mahmud from Bangladesh:
I cry as these birds cry
And what he said lastly made sense. He said that poets write with hearts gone bad because of injustice. These 64 poets from all over the SAARC region had collectively sealed their bonds with casual cards, hugs and courtesy and they were all poets with bad hearts. I, for one, made the most of whatever came my way and by the time I had left Bhubaneswar, I was resplendent with a new resolve of writing also in my vernacular language, the stream which hosts my inner reflections.
Towards the end of the festival, unable to say no to a request by the Vice Chancellor of Ravenshaw, I attempted writing in Bangla while reflecting on the battling borders of our region:
Kobey jano ami amakey charlam
Aaka holo kobey jano tumi and bhumi
Bhashon aar Bhossho
(When was it that I had slipped into my shadow?
When was it that you were painted in your own land?
Amidst rhetoric and ruin)
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