Abjuring solemn observation, Arundhathi Subramaniam’s new poems are lightly laden with life’s epiphanies and shot through with humour and self-mockery
The previous collection of Arundhathi Subramaniam, award-winning author of 11 books of poetry and prose, titled When God is a Traveller, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. The dry words of Eunice de Souza, who was her teacher, serve to set the tone for these new poems. “Best to meet in poems,” says Eunice, wryly. This note of some sharpness, bluntness, irony and elusiveness sets the tone for Arundhathi’s poems.
Some poets use language to reveal. Others use language to conceal. Arundhathi seems to do more of the latter. In a poem I enjoyed, she seems to speak of a childhood memory of a sister’s homecoming, and she is composing a poem to greet her sister on her arrival: “It was a rainy day in Bombay, so easy/ to splice into the cypress groves/ and briny Aegean breezes/ of a classical spring/ alive with lutesong/ and given a chance today, I’d be ready/ to hijack a school bus/ and set full steam ahead/ to Mystras or to Crete/ and once there, to waft/ back again on foaming lute waves/ into a sleepy Bombay apartment/ with its peepul tree and breezes from Oman.”
This has a reality to it and does not have the ambiguity of tone and matter found in many of the poems here. A favourite of mine is Mitti, which tellingly reveals the relationship between humans and the moon:
“I figured that the moon was a likely mud-gazer,/ just as we are moon-gazers!/ and so I uncovered/ the old role of poets –/ to be messengers/ between moon and mud/ and the great longing of life to hold/ and be held.”
In The Fine Art of Aging, another most original poem where she reveals both humour and wisdom, she brings us the old wise woman of Tamil literature—Avvayar. But Arundhathi brings a gritty disrespect and familiarity to this new version of Avvayar, divesting her of magic and mystery, making her the toothless crone next door: “But she knows the journey/ from goddess to gran,/ sylph to hag,/ prom queen to queen mum,/ is longer than most,/ more tortuous.”
Arundhathi’s Avvayar is down-to-earth, funny and loveable. “Spare me the sainthood/of mad women mystics,” she says. This Avvayar makes another choice: “Fearless friend to gods,/ ally of peasants,/ counsellor to kings,/ traveller of the darkest streets,/ she walks the world alone./ And on such a path, she says,/ Its best to be a crone.”
Pitiless, you might say, but true as mud, and ever so funny! “One way to outwit death, she says, is to invite it over. Wear it.”
Lovers end as photographs. Love without a story. Arundhathi must be one of the few poets who has tried the power of laughter and self-mockery, and found it satisfying! She’s no self-dramatising heroine. Heroines end up as grans anyway. She finds another way “to walk the razor’s edge”. knowing there’s no sadly or happily ever after. Arundhathi, who abjures goddesshood and magic and happily ever after, is more realistic about a memory of her mother seen through a keyhole: “And that’s how I discovered/ that keyholes always reveal more/ than doorways./ That a chink in a wall/ is all you need/ to tumble into a parallel universe.” I was reminded of Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind: “Eavesdroppers often hear highly entertaining things!” he says to a furious Scarlett.
Arundhathi may demystify the mystique of saints and goddesses, she may be content to accept Earth, “this lunatic suburb” as it is, but she recognises the monk who has maintained silence for 16 years was once a spare parts dealer who got tripped up by: “the deepest pothole/ he’s ever known./ too deep/ to be called love,/ that turned him into a spare part himself,/ utterly dispensable,/ wildly unemployed.” She realises, in another poem, that dying is hard work. As hard as birthing! But living may be learning how to die. Of the goddess Neeli Mariamman, she says: “in the great garrulity of gods she is silent./ She’ll never be the life/ of the party/ but she’s not concerned with the party/ She is life –”
Christopher Fry once said that laughter is the surest sign of the genius of the gods. It is much in evidence in Arundhathi’s latest collection. She does not let us “go silent into that dark night”. Instead of ranting, raging against “the dying of the light”, she chooses ambiguity, laughter, and a sharp sense of humour as one of the best weapons to possess and employ in life and in approaching death.