A return to light

For emerging poets like me, C P Surendran has been a poet in absentia for much of our reading life. He has been known to us as a literary figure — novelist, screenplay writer, and of course, journalist — but his poetry has eluded us, because till now, most of his books of poems were out of print. We caught glimpses of his poetry in anthologies, such as the one edited by his friend Jeet Thayil a few years back. There were also hints that Surendran’s poetic career was over. This new “collected poems” puts such speculations to rest and also introduces a new generation of readers to his early work.

At once, it performs the very important task of republishing poems from his out-of-print early collections, such as Gemini II (1994), Posthumous Poems (1999), and Canaries on the Moon (2002), as well as new work in Available Light and its predecessor, Portraits of the Space We Occupy (2007). The poet alerts us that some of the earlier poems have been edited. Since, I have not read the earlier versions, it is impossible for me to comment on whether the editing improved them, or took away their youthful energy and imposed a more considered literariness on them.

Since the book has been arranged as latest first — the oldest book, Gemini II comprises the last section — I read the book backwards. Like all collected works, there is a sense of the biographical, even autobiographical, in this volume. Encountering the young Surendran is like coming across, in the words of his mentor Dom Moraes, “Mexican cacti”, flowering in the desert. The subject of many of the poems in this section is love, or more accurately, a post-love longing, that offers us a glimpse of the “impenetrable despondency” of his youth that Ranjit Hoskote — who has also written a deeply intellectual and affectionate foreword to this book — remembers. Some of the images Surendran uses in these poems are unforgettable: 

“He sits in a chair / Whose fourth leg’s his. / He loves this chair. / They used to make love in it. / That was when the chair / Had four legs plus two, / Eight legs. Days with legs. / Since then there’s been a lot of walking out. / Now the chair’s short of a leg. / And he’s lending his. (‘A Friend in Need’)” As Hoskote reveals, the cause for the despondency was a disintegrating marriage. But it was also a result of the milieu of the late eighties and early nineties in which Surendran emerged as a poet. He reminisces about this in his essay, “Riding the Horse of Life to Death: A Tribute”, about his friend and poet Vijay Nambisan who died on August 10 this year.

Available Light by C P Surendran

In the essay, which some might argue is also a poem of sorts, Surendran describes the poetic impulse of young writers then as: “a romantic, seemingly interminable act of self-sacrifice.” He contrasts it with the current working conditions of Indian writers, especially in English, describing it as a “career” — though I must dispute this claim. There are very few Indian writers who make a living out of their writing; for poets, it’s even more difficult. What one must allow Surendran is, however, that writers — and even poets — have access to many means of reaching out to an audience (online and offline magazines, independent publishers) that their generation did not.

Surendran describes that lost time with a bit of nostalgia: “words had to be bought with a little bit of life in exchange, an unsustainable trade”. Naturally, driven by the most basic instinct of survival, Surendran and most of his friends moved on; became gentrified. (He contends Nambisan did not.) He went on to become a celebrated journalist with The Times of India and then the editor in chief of DNA. The influence of pressing journalistic concerns becomes apparent in poems such as “Umbrellas in Hong Kong” about the pro-democracy protests in the Chinese city in 2014: “A light portable cover for protection... / Can also, like a hundred flowers, bloom in the air / When Xi’s gardener arrive with guns and pepper spray.” This is particularly heartening on a personal note for a journalist such as me, who also moonlights as a poet.

To publish collected works mid-career might be considered an abdication by some, a declaration of retirement. For Surendran, however, it’s a return to the light of day, a realigning of a poetic career that some thought was over. The title, as Hoskote tells us, is derived from an interview of Satyajit Ray by Shyam Benegal. In the title poem of book, addressed to Ilse Koch, the cruel wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, and describes the relationship between desire and power: “it dims the sight / To available light, so the others flatten formless / To a uniform dark...” In Surendran’s poetic universe, there is no uniform darkness, but a continuous passage through light, umbra and penumbra of consciousness and ethics.