Unforgettable characters in poems
Poetry, or any art form, works in mysterious ways. The poem I find memorable can merely be a passing thought for someone else. I am not implying that the merits of a poem are always subjective. There are objective ways to assess a poem. But a beautifully crafted poem might not work for a reader while a shabbily crafted one might end up changing his life. So, why do poets work hard to achieve perfection? Like most things, it is a matter of degree. A well-crafted poem is more likely to leave a mark on a reader than a poorly-crafted one. A reader falls in love with a poem accidentally almost always, but with well-crafted poems, these accidents are more likely to happen.Â
What do I mean by accident? What I mean is that too many factors come together in too many different ways to determine if a poem will work for a particular reader or not, and most of those factors are not in control of either the poet or the reader. This is not to say that if I don’t like a poem, the poet has not worked hard enough to write a good poem. The poet might still have deployed the tropes of poetry in the best possible manner but it might not have worked for me because of some trivial reason. I will give an example from my experience (it happens to be a famous example by accident). Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 - Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day. Only if I intend to insult someone will I compare them to a summer’s day. I hated (I still do) Indian summers so much that I wrote a cheeky response to the poem way back in 2020 -Â
Coming back to the point. Sonnet 18 is considered one of the all-time great love poems and since it is Shakespeare, there can be no doubt about craft. Shakespeare’s work is the very definition of fine craft. But it did not ‘click’ for me simply because the connotation of the word ‘summer’ was and is different for me. There is no way Shakespeare could have made amends based on how a reader far far removed from him in terms of time and geography would have felt about it. I took an obvious example by choosing a poet so far removed from my world simply to highlight the different connotations of the same word. This ‘not clicking’ happens at multiple levels and in more subtle ways when we read contemporary poets.
The ‘clicking’ of a poem also happens at multiple levels and for different reasons and most likely the poet has nothing to do with it. I am not talking about the poems that evoke universal emotions like love, sorrow etc. (for eg, there was a time when my heart was broken, and being in my early twenties I believed that the universe revolved around me and hence there was no one else the Urdu poet Ahmad Faraz could have written his ghazal ranjish hi sahi for). I am talking about poems that work for you for reasons specific to you. This is where there is an immense scope of discourse on poetry. There can be as many ways of how a poem works as there are people getting affected by it. But I can speak only for myself. So, the poems I am writing about today are the ones that have affected me in ways specific to me. Or so I believe. If that is not the case, let the love-illusion remain (kuch toh mere pindaar-e-mohabbat ka bharam rakh) as Ahmad Faraz says in his ghazal I am still possessive about.
The common thread across these poems is that each one of them is about characters I find impossible to forget and each for different reasons.Â
On Death of a Sunday Painter by Arvind Krishna MehrotraÂ
When I am asked about the city I grew up in, I say Allahabad. The name Allahabad comes with its own connotations. People with even a mild interest in literature associate Allahabad with some kind of high-falutin literary culture. I have even been told on my face that my Hindi must be flawless since I am from Allahabad, the city of poets and of the megastar Amitabh Bachhan. I don’t deny that the enigma exists because the city of Allahabad is as enigmatic to me as it is to them. Because I am not exactly from Allahabad. I come from a small industrial town in the outskirts of Allahabad. The historical and cultural significance of the city (as people know it) starts to quickly fade away as one starts moving away from the center of the city - the area around company garden or Azad Park.Â
The firm earth of history on the banks of Ganga and Yamuna slips from beneath one’s feet and one finds oneself deep into the murky waters of nothingness that is a small North Indian town which has neither the rustic charm of a village nor a city’s hustle-bustle. It has the worst of both worlds and this is where I grew up. Allahabad for me still is a mythical city of university professors, students, poets, and artists.Â
It is in this context that I read the poem On the Death of a Sunday Painter. It was somehow assumed that there are eccentric artists living in the Allahabad city and one is supposed to be reverential towards them. I am not under any kind of illusion. I know the harsh realities of the city and the romantic version of it is but a relic from the past that probably never existed. This exactly is what makes this poem even more special. Special for someone with the exact background I come from. Someone for whom this city was just out of reach.
Let’s come to the poem now. This poem reads like a condensed version of an interesting character straight out of a novel. It is as if Mehrotra has taken the qualities most salient to the Sunday painter and has listed them down in tight lines. One more thing to note here is the fact that the character is easily forgettable if not committed to words. Someone ordinary, by virtue of the details given out about him, becomes memorable. Mehrotra is a master of that. There is nothing else one can say about this character that will make it more life-like to me.
Also, the image of the poem’s speaker himself on a cycle is so familiar. I have seen many mourning processions where there is the family that stays closest to the body. They are the ones carrying it. Then there are relatives; and then trailing at the back, are people who join the procession mid-journey. Mostly because they might be going in the same direction. Mehrotra’s cycle image reminds me of such people.Â
Shyamalda by Amit Chaudhuri
This poem is different from Mehrotra’s in terms of the poems’ speakers’ relationship with the main character. Shayamalda seems to be someone close to the speaker in Amit Chaudhuri’s poem while the Sunday painter was clearly an eccentric figure whose funeral Mehrotra’s speaker left early from.Â
The characters are different also in the way I related to them. While the Sunday painter is a remnant of an imaginary romantic past, Shyamalda is literally me in the present. I could imagine myself not caring about the hovering flies on chhana and sandesh, when pierced by hunger.
Though the poem is located at a specific place and talks about a specific ‘universal decorum’, what comes to mind are my excursions to places like streets near Delhi’s Jama Masjid. I used to go there with the sole intent of stuffing myself with a variety of food. The decorums that were dismissed there, went beyond hygiene. The contents of the meal in no particular order used to be as follows - roasted chicken dipped in butter, seekh kebabs dipped in butter, nihari (if we’re lucky), rabri, shahi-tukda with mango ice-cream, rooh-afza sharbat, and a cup of tea in the end to bring it all together. I can imagine Shyamalda in this poem as someone who would be happy to accompany me on such an excursion.Â
Chaudhuri is a master of bringing a scene alive. While reading his poetry (and fiction), I find myself in the middle of a scene thinking about the nuts and bolts of what’s happening. I almost forget that I am reading a poem or a novel. For example, take these lines from this poem -Â
The ants, though touched
by mishtis’ resin, had
laboriously freed themselves
to ascend slopes; the flies
enlarged by their environs, banged into each other. While reading these lines, I almost forgot that the poem is about a character called Shyamalda and started thinking about struggling ants and banging flies in a sweet shop. The ant image comes alive for me with the use of laboriously freed themselves and the fly image with enlarged by their environs. Remove these and the lines become ordinary, reduced merely to the function of setting context for Shyamalda to enter the poem and say his magic line - I would flick it off, and eat!.Â
These unexpected interludes (unexpected because one realises it only when one is in the middle of it) is what makes Chaudhuri’s writing memorable. The transition from the world of Shyamalda’s hunger to the miniature world of those windows and back is so seamless that one could almost not see it as an interlude or a change in scene.Â
Parameshwari by Arun Kolatkar
Every person carries a halo of world around herself or himself. When the memory of a person gets erased, what is also lost is this halo only that person carried. It might be someone completely irrelevant or unimportant. But a world lost is a world lost. Literature revives these worlds by bringing to life the characters that are almost like the ones we have forgotten. This poem reminds me of one such forgotten character from my childhood that was and still is completely irrelevant to me but she carried a halo of stubbornness and irreverence borne out of knowing the ways of this world too well. Her name was Lachhmeena. Until the time we lived in a rented house that was shared between two families, she cleaned the toilets once or twice a week. I remember my mother telling me about her courage. Apparently, she was fighting a case against someone powerful who was accused of murdering her son. She had refused to take a single paisa and settle. No one seems to know what happened to her. We never heard about her after we moved to another house.Â
I bring up Lachhmeena because every single thing said about Parameshwari in this poem was true for her. Right from the physical description - black lips and blacker teeth, one eye dim/and mucus green with cataract, leathery face, shrivelled dugs and so on - to carrying the air of knowing the world for the clever forgery that it is. This is one of the many things literature does - unlocks a world one had locked into memory’s dimmed places (phrase borrowed from Agha Shahid Ali’s).
What did I achieve by getting reminded of someone from my past I had forgotten? Nothing, really. It just re-opened a world for me and gave me something to think about. It brought to life something that was very much a part of my growing up, no matter how small or trivial.Â
You must have noticed, gentle reader, that none of these characters are grandiose. They are ordinary in the sense that one can’t imagine them being involved in history-bending events. And yet they are memorable. They come from our daily lives. Poetry, or any art form, underscores the seemingly unimportant and makes it memorable for us. What Arvind Krishna Mehortra, in an essay, said about the Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla is true for all three poets we discussed in this essay - ‘To read him is to read not a fictionalised version of what is already known, but what is constantly being inscribed in and erased from the margins of our consciousness’1.
Thank you for a reintroduction of sorts to poetry. I have never read poetry after school and maybe this is the cue for me to start scouting for anthologies again.