Nostalgia unlimited

How We Measured Time

Author: Sivakami Velliangiri

Publisher: Poetry Primero

Pages: 63

Price: Rs 200

Sivakami Velliangiri has the unique distinction of publishing her first book — the one under review — after having become a senior poet. (She has published a chapbook earlier.) “There was an intervention by the muses themselves,” she tells poet Michelle D’Costa in a recent interview about the publication process, adding: “All my friends expected a book of poems from me.” Velliangiri has been publishing in magazines and journals regularly since the late-1970s, but a book is another deal altogether, and the fact that it has been brought out by Poetrywala — the Mumbai-based independent publisher that is at the forefront of poetry publication in the country — does in fact point to an intervention by the muses.

What one encounters in this slim volume is rare for a first book — a mature style, a confident voice, none of the fumbles of a younger poet’s first book. (Velliangiri acknowledges my friend Arjun Rajendran, a supremely talented poet himself, as an editor of her manuscript and Divya Nadkarni, another talented poet and a former editor at Poetrywala, as the book’s commissioning editor.) The material with which Velliangiri works in individual poems is also gleaned from a life full of rich experiences, of discovery, celebration, jubilation, and loss. The moving emotion, as D’Costa identifies in her interview, is nostalgia — for time past and also present.

The title poem, which appears pretty late in the volume, begins: “We measure time with the lunar calendar. / A fortnight — the waxing moon, the waning moon.” This is a disarming entry into an image that manifests itself into something far more poignant — the changes in the health of a dear one. “We watched her health improve or decline. / the moon and her mind took a walk like the earth / even the waves of the sea conspired. / We were eye-witnesses.” The reader is made aware that the passage of time is not measured only by the certainty of planetary movement, but also the uncertainty of human health and pending loss.

The loss — of a mother — is described in the next two poems of the book, “Amma’s Afterlife” and “An Epilogue of Sorts”. Both are written in a register that deny them the sentimental immersion of a traditional elegy. In the first one, the perspective is that of children: “Amma’s mortal body was not permitted to be carried to her home state. / Our neighbours insisted they keep her on the land she had come to live. / My children shed tears for their Ammamma —” This allows a sort of imagined afterlife for the dead person: “My daughter fabricated a story of the Damned Diamonds / that the French had sold under the table in Pondicherry. / She called it ‘The Blue Jager Fluorescence of Contraband Good.’” The second poem is much shorter: “Amma wanted the hierarchy / to end. She swallowed the crushed diamonds. / But death came slowly, very slowly.” The passage of time is measured yet again with a different counter — waiting for the arrival of death.

Discussing the thread of nostalgia in the book, Velliangiri tells D’Costa: “The nostalgia poems belong to the book, or rather the book happened because of the nostalgia. My poems are mostly ‘anecdotal’.” Most of the anecdotes in the books are about houses, “Bharati Mill, Pondicherry”, “Amma’s Paternal House”, “The Manjalikulam House”, “Vatsala’s House”, “The Singarathopu House”, and “Housing Board Flat, Swathi Nagar”. The movement from one house to the other — quite common in our lives — is not only an accumulation of experiences, but also a recognition of the fact that the only home a poet has is her poetry. 

In “Bharati Mill, Pondicherry”, Velliangiri begins: “Houses are permanent structures”, but immediately eschews this: “With a sleight / of grandfather’s arm, the front porch / became replete with verandahs, the back / bared to the minimal three steps; / ventilators caved in to permit palms.” The casual architectural callisthenics are symbolic of a poet’s own craft, of building, altering an entire life merely with a sleight of a few words. Velliangiri is able to perform this magic several times in her slim volume that leaves one hungry for more of her work.

The writer’s novel, Ritual, is forthcoming this year