Conversations about longing

The poem opening the book under review is titled “It is 1966” and owes a debt — as acknowledged by the poet — to Aga Shahid Ali’s “A Lost Memory of Delhi”. The narrator of Srilata’s poem, like the one on Ali’s, spies on her parents. They are on a date: “I take a taxi to the park / where they are sitting on a bench, / a foot apart from each other, / he with his face resolutely averted, / she with her eyes on the poorly tended flowers.” It is before the narrator is born, so this is an imagined memory, one that she cannot have. Yet, this poem is infused with such poignancy, making it the perfect opening for this book full of disappearances, departures, and longing.

It is unfashionable these days to imagine the narrative first person as that of the poet, but in this poem, it is impossible not to do so, especially after an insight that Srilata provides in the preface: “The absent are always present in our lives, in difficult and powerful ways… Growing up as the daughter of a single mother, I was acutely conscious of the absence of a father. My mother’s challenging life… had implications for my own life.” As she goes on to explain, the incomplete family unit in which she grew up was an anomaly in the India of 1970s, when families comprised not only two parents and their children, but also the extended network of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc.

In the opening poem, Srilata goes on to describe the beginning of the estrangement between her parents as she imagines it: “It is the beginning, I know, of that great quarrel./ …I walk up, older, already, than them both, / tell them I am their only daughter— / and will they please please look at each other”. Her pleading, however, has little effect on her parents: “My mother looks at the flowers, the crumble of her years. / My father, away, from us both.” The absence of a parent and the inherited estrangement shoots through this slim book like a scarlet thread.

The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans Author: K Srilata Publisher: Poetrywala Pages: 77 Price: Rs 300

A few pages later, we encounter a companion poem titled, “Father”, in which the narrator yet again goes to a park: “Today, I left my office in the pouring rain, / just to meet him, just to eat the cotton candy which he insists, always, on buying me.” Three lines occur, almost as a refrain, twice in the poem: “My father left my mother when I was two but he still loves me / My father left my mother for another woman when I was two but once a week we meet in the park. / He buys me cotton candy and sometimes we read a poem or two together.” These lines are italicised, providing a visual sign to the reader. This poem is also inspired by another one, Karin Gottshall’s “More Lies”, in which the narrator imagines going to meet a non-existent sister at a café. In both poems, the act of imagination becomes one of birthing; in Srilata’s piece, the father is no longer the progenitor, but the poet is.

An important tool that Srilata uses in her poems is conversation with other poems, both contemporary and classical. In one of these, she imagines what Penelope would have told Ulysses — the hero of Homer’s Odyssey — on his return from his wanderings: “Twenty years of missing you, Ulysses, / and the trees for each year are still hiding, / and entire forest of them, / out there somewhere, / beyond the flight of birds.” Longing is imagined as fecundity in another poem (“A Disappeared Person”): “But surely, growth, and all sorts of things, / are possible in the life / of a person who has disappeared?”

But disappearances are not always voluntary, especially forced ones in conflict zones such as Kashmir. In one of the most political poems of the book, “I Bury Them Under the Witnessing Yellow of the Chinar”, she imagines the voice of Atta Mohammad, “gravedigger and caretaker of unmarked graves in Northern Kashmir”: “A friend teases, / ‘Mohammad, you have gotten rather good / at this burying business, haven’t you?’ / He is right. I will bury anything that makes its way to me. / What I cannot bury is the remembering.” 

Indeed, though people disappear, the ghost of remembrance continues to haunt us forever.

The writer’s book of poems, Visceral Metropolis, was published in 2017 and his novel, Ritual, is forthcoming this year.