The poems in Arundhathi Subramaniam’s When God is a Traveller , are evocative, soulful and steadfast in their exploration of love, belonging, family and faith. The book demands compulsive re-reading. You read each poem, one after another, because you cannot stop. And when you’re done reading, you sit for a long while… and reach for the book again.
The English teacher in me, the worshipper of words, the eternal romantic is struck by the usage in Lover Tongue. “ Perhaps I will tire of your grammar/ find myself yearning for the rumble of verb or the soft/flesh of pure vowel/ on those mornings when I stumble/ over your landscape of unforgiving nouns. ”
I laugh out loud at the poet’s sense of fun in Quick-fix Memos for Difficult Days : “ Settling is bondage. Wandering, vagabondage. (Someone said that before?) (Citizenship is bondage. Dual citizenship, James Bondage. That’s a first!)”
There’s humour and anxiety in the word play in Printer’s Copy . “ The ailing poet examines/ his typescript, adds a comma, deletes/ the second adjective, prunes/ a line-length, cuts, sutures, enjambs… ” The poem ends with a familiar thought: “ The need to believe language/ will see us through/ and that old, old need/ to go, typo-free, to the printer .”
The book contains poetry about sewing, about the kitchen sink and its yearning, young students and orange lunch boxes, fellow travellers in the local train and about buildings and bones. In Transplant, the poet wonders about a plant wondering about its identity. “ Show me a plant ,” demands the poet, “ that’s not in search of a pot/ that knows/ whether it’s meant/ for orchard/rainforest/or jam jar/ that knows, for that matter/ if it’s a creeper/conifer/ or just an upstart crocus/ too big for its boots .”
The imagery in the love poems is unflinching and unusual. In Eight Poems for Shakuntala , the poet retells the epic love story with her own brand of empathy and observation. In the poem on Dushyanta, Arundhathi Subramaniam gives us a beautiful flawed man. “ A man with winedark eyes who knows/of the velvet liquors and hushed laughter/ in curtained recesses. A man whose smile is abstraction/ and crowsfeet, whose gaze/ is just a little shopsoiled… ” She ends by asking, “ Who hasn’t known a man cinnamon-tongued/stubbled with desire/ and just the right smear of history? ” Who, indeed.
Two poems especially stand out for me. In How Some Hindus Find Their Personal Gods , the poet describes the process of choosing an ishta devta - “ the perfect minor deity…/content to play a cameo/ in everyone’s life but your own. A god who looks/ like he could understand/ errors in translation, blizzards on the screen/gaps in memory/ lapses in attention… ” The god in these lines, understands even the, “ awkward Remington stutter of your heart/ who could make them his own. After that you can settle for none other. ” A deeply personal connect.
In the last poem of the collection that lends its title to the title of the book, the poet wonders about Kartikeya, Subramania, her namesake. Here too is an unlofty god, who, “ sits wordless on park benches, ” who has seen so much of life, “ who no longer begrudges his prize/his parents their partisanship. ” The poet ends When God is a Traveller by saying, “ Trust the god/ ready to circle the world all over again/ this time for no reason at all/ other than to see it/ through your eyes. ”
On that note, it’s back to the book, for me.
(Arundhathi Subramaniam won the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry for her book, When God is a Traveller.)
Srividya is a poet. Read her work at>www.rumwrapt.blogspot.in
