Poetry Written By The Javelin
Prasanta Chakravarty ________ What the poet produces is akin to the javelin thrower’s act—a bit of the soil from the entrails of the earth, which hides concealed spots of blood. Ephemera it is; mere unearthed bits of soil. All around us are strewn these passing tableaux of shining ephemera, if we are able to touch their myriad forms, feels Monika Kumar, who is one of the leading contemporary poets writing in Hindi. Her maiden book is titled आशचर्यवत\ (Ascharyavat—Wondrous. Denotes both the state of wonderment itself/time that causes a state or wonder or the ability to feel wondrous. Just published from Vani Prakashan. Perhaps we could start from the middle, or stay in the middle, as Kumar does, in one of her finely wrought poems: बीच से शुरू करते हैं (Let us Begin at the Middle).To be attuned to the many miracles that are continually happening around us, perhaps we need to appreciate the role of the ongoing process of living itself—which means the capacity to remain in res medias and appreciate the staying power of things and relationships that bind us. The middle is neither the zone of hastened invasion nor that of an end which often engenders boredom and shrillness. मुझे तुम बीच का कौर खिलाना, न पहले जिसे तुम भूख के मारे निगल जाते हो न आख़िरी जिसे कहते हुए तुम बिरक्त हो जाते हो मुझे बीच का निवाला खिलाना, जिसे तुम बेध्यानी में बमौज खाते हो Easy marveling at the trivial and the ordinary comes with a sudden realization of this sense of बेध्यानी में बमौज(unselfconscious gaiety)throughout the collection. And we, the readers, acquiesce willfully to this magnetic pull—brought on par with the seeds and the flowers, the fruits and the animals. In fact, the animals that arrive in, and quicken, her poems are often the ones that populate our diurnal existence—ants, lizards, squirrels and rabbits. Do we pay enough attention to our feral neighbours? If we did we would know that— # अभी हम खड़े है उस बिंदु पर जहाँ हम चाहते हैं यह घर चींटों से मुक्त हो जाये और चींटे करते हैं कल्पनाएँ दुनिया की हर चीज़ काश बताशा हो जाये # छिपकलियाँ एकांत के पार्षद की तरह घर में रहतीं और मैं व्याकुलता की बन्दी की तरह # गिलहरियों को अलबत्ता मेरी बातों में कोई रूचि नहीं उन्हें दिलचस्पी है सिर्फ रोटी के टुकड़ों में जो स्कुल के बच्चे अपने डब्बे से गिरा देते हैं # यह नरम- नरम जो बचा हैं खरगोश में उस मासूमियत का शेष है जो कछुए के साथ दौड़ लगाने की स्पर्धा में थक कर नींद बन गयी In each of these sections Kumar deftly changes the viewpoint from the human to the non-human and the world immediately turns upside down and kaleidoscopic. And then she brings us crashing down to the comic situation where we are seen wallowing and indulging in our exaggerated sense of self-hood. In a similar vein there are some exquisitely refined and intimate portraits of the botanical—flowers, seeds and fruits—which cocoon our daily lives even as we are mostly oblivious to them. The wondrous comes to us in many forms; and the world that Monika Kumar opens up for us, the unexpected turns that her lines take, are startling indeed. The local habitations and surroundings turn strikingly vivid. And it is here that she gives us a chance to delve deeper, and vertically, some more: she often begins to take a flight in many of her poems, where the revelation begins to take a truly astonishing shape, and yet often the process then stops short of traversing the whole trajectory of such a flight. This happens, one suspects, owing paradoxically to her deep investment in the local and the communal, though we know that she is an avid reader of poetry from all parts of the world. It is this investment in the common and the earthy—school students and chowkidars, bus conductors, local sportspersons, the housewife, the sweetmeat shop, the petulant lovers in the locality—that keeps her grounded in the intermediate space of living. She is alive to the equity of life. But it is this same investment in the local that sometimes thwarts her from relating such wondrous everyday situations to two crucial dimensions of living itself. One: the inscape or the coutours of our inner worlds—a constant journey that happens within. The other: locating all shining objects and relationships with the cosmological and the astral. Those who are able to take cognizance of the wondrous around us have this special ability to string together a thread between the inner and the outer so that all dualism of existence evaporates. Sometimes Kumar does take a momentous leap and is able to make this vertical connection. The results are truly magical. One such poem is titled बूढ़ा और बच्चा उर्फ़ दादा और पोता(The Elderly and the Child, alias Grandfather and Grandson) Ostensibly the poem is a commentary on three generations—the elderly, the young adult and the child. But more than that, it is blessed with a remarkable realization that the elderly and the child are threaded together in a deeper relationship of wondrous existence that befuddles the adult world. The elderly reaches that state of childlike naiveté after a lifetime of journeying. विलम्ब बूढ़े लोगों का गुण है उनके भीतर स्पंदन है पर चेहरे स्थिर और विलम्बित है उनके चेहरे के सामने समाज अपने बदलाव पटकता है …बूढ़े लोग शांत चेहरों से युद्ध लड़ते है लहभग सभी विवादों और दुखों का अंत वे जानते है The elderly know the final results of all arguments and sorrows. Therefore they realize events intuitively and merely smile about such events—living in hope and curiosity about already known facts. In its his own way, the child naturally tries to sense all that is magical and true within his newly found world and finds the elderly to be the most conducive fellow traveler on that common journey. Thus, the grandfather and the grandchild form the secret, preternatural couple.