Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 4, Number 1. May 2021. ISSN: 2581-7094
The Real and the Unreal and Other Poems
The Real and the Unreal
and Other Poems: Nishi Pulugurtha, Authorspress, 2020. pp 80. ISBN: 978-93-90459-53-7,
Price: Rs. 295
--- Basudhara Roy
“To reach a geographic frontier, one needs only
a strong pair of legs; to reach an intellectual frontier, one needs a trained
mind,” writes geographer Yi-fu Tuan. To arrive at an emotional frontier, one
needs, I would add, an ever empathetic imagination and an enhanced level of
attention to the world that weaves itself continually around our bodies and
minds. The translation of sensory experience into emotive fact calls for an
orientation of sight, experience and vision that leads, in turn, to a nuanced accomplishment
of the act of attention. When allied with spiritual integrity, respect for life
and a higher sense of selfhood, attention becomes an art that helps illumine
the world with tenderness and faith.
To find one’s way into the poetry of Nishi
Pulugurtha is to enter just such a realm of heightened attention. The depth of
detail here is so staggering that it amounts to a certain self-reflexiveness of
thought. In the sixty bafflingly simple poems in her debut collection, The
Real and the Unreal and Other Poems, one confronts a wide landscape of
quiet, contented silence where thoughts concentrate on their own finesse and
life’s greatest complexities are steadily unwound into tender understanding and
mature resignation. “I write on almost anything and everything that catches my
eye, that sets me thinking, that makes me express,” states Pulugurtha. “Just
about anything that strikes me and remains with me.” Her subjects are many and
free-ranging – “from nature, to children playing in the streets, to a plant growing
through the masonry, to the flowers blooming in my pots, to solitude and
silence, to the masks we wear, to places that I have visited and how they stay
on with me, to nostalgia and memory, to the myriad changes that life is all
about and life in these trying times.” Composed mainly during the first wave of
the pandemic in India, the quietness in these poems take on a deeper autumnal
shade. Silence, distance, isolation and suffering are not romantic choices here
but the coordinates of a difficult world. In ‘The Locked Workplace’, the poet
visualizes her workplace as another home suffering from lockdown loneliness:
foliage all around
overgrown maybe
unkempt too
empty corridors, empty
stairs
a musty smell from the
closed rooms
thick layers of dust
everywhere
the gate closed, the
creepers wild
the grass untidy
cobwebs too, in places
as we remain locked in
at home (19)
‘Walking Home’ is a
poignant articulation of the plight of migrant workers in India in that phase:
the city had been his
home for some years
leaving his family he
moved here
for work, for sustenance
he lived in a room with
four others
cramped, but a place to
sleep.
and then it happened
he had to leave
his belongings, just a
few basics
the bag on his back, he
sets off
there were more like him
they were going home
In
‘The City has No Room for Us’ the contrast between the workers’ understanding
of the city as home and their forced return to the place the city looks upon as
their home, bespeaks a deep pain of betrayal. In poem after poem in the
collection, the reader is both enticed and amazed by the poet’s intense desire
to look at things straight in the eye, without metaphor and thoroughly without
trappings. In the title poem of the volume, Pulugurtha marvels at how the world
has remained the same throughout the flow of ages:
to see and ignore
to conceal, to lie
to bluff, to fight
against known
and unknown enemies
harbouring all around
waiting to pierce, to
stab
to hurt
to wreck, to destroy
to ruin, to reveal
the truth, ugly and
bizarre
unreal yet real.
The relationship between fact and fiction has
been so swapped that one is no more convinced of a boundary line between the
real and the unreal. Consistently at work in this book is a poetic lens
that is largely photographic. “Nishi Pulugurtha,” as the eminent poet-critic
Sanjukta Dasgupta rightly reminds us in her Foreword to the book, “is a widely
published travelogue writer. In fact, the poems stand out due to their
descriptive brilliance and due to the sincere reflections on sights and sounds,
feelings and emotions, sometimes resigned, sometimes transcendent.”
Pulugurtha’s poems document the world in its stark realism without complaint or
regret. One meets here life’s immensity, its large-scale variety and its everyday
injustices – both great and small. If nature is kind, life is often not. In
poems like ‘Moyna’, ‘Anu and Moyna’ and ‘Mela’, the unkindness of life is
almost unbearable. Yet, the poet’s attitude towards it is unmarked by anger or
despair. Brave with fortitude, she calmly and analytically examines life’s
various facets and penetrates to the depths of its truths only to leave them
untouched when found. In ‘Bitter Gourd’, for instance, she writes:
Among all the dirt,
there it was
Pushing back so much of
the unwanted
Breaking out
Pushing
Carving a small place
Being seen
Uncared but there.
“Uncared but there” is a motif that emerges
powerfully from The Real and the Unreal and Other Poems. To
the poet, this tendency of nature to follow her own particular rhythms despite
human indifference is both lesson and wisdom. Pulugurtha’s poems, the reader
will realize, locate themselves in the palimpsest of the everyday. Her subjects
are rooted in the routine of her regular life. Traced through her photographic
clarity, however, the most mundane details acquire a startling newness. One is
infected by the sheer wonder of the perception that contours the world it
inhabits with an almost child-like faith. In ‘It Does Find a Way’, she writes
of a small plant’s resilience:
Beside a wall that
separates
The small plant seeps
through
Breaking through a gap
Creating a crevice
Wild and green
It stands up steady
Breaking through the
masonry
It does find a way somewhere,
somehow
The landscape of her poems is decidedly urban,
yet hemmed and embroidered powerfully by nature’s benevolence. These pockets of
trees, plants, flowers, rivers, dilapidated structures and firm ruins
constitute the perches of Pulugurtha’s consciousness. Amidst the regular
bustle, breathlessness and uncertainty of life, it is the predictability and
promise of these sites that anchor the poet’s sanity. The range of emotions
these poems take us through is staggering. There is agony at life’s injustices,
pain at the loss of familiar landmarks, hurt at the world’s selfishness and
disregard, and loud assertions of a powerful female selfhood in a patriarchal
world. But above all, these poems stand out for their eco-conscious sensibility
and their sense of repose in nature’s bounty of colour, form and wisdom.
Nishi Pulugurtha is the
Secretary of the Intercultural Poetry and Performance
Library (IPPL) in Kolkata that has been steadily
attempting to “bring poetry to the heart of the nation” through committed
efforts at fostering and building creative connections across geographical
distances and linguistic imaginations. Nurturing and being nurtured by the
vibrant poetic community at IPPL, Pulugurtha’s poems capture the experiential
terrain of urban life with an insight that establishes resonances with the work
of other IPPL poets like Bashabi Fraser, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Sutapa Chaudhuri,
Gopal Lahiri, Jaydeep Sarangi, Zinia Mitra, Amit Shankar Saha, Joie Bose,
Jagari Mukherjee and Sufia Khatoon, among others.
Blending memorably into the spirit of this
collection are the ten concluding ‘Dementia Poems’ that earnestly articulate
the restlessness, poignancy and shadows of a mind battling dementia in a world
where psycho-physical frailty and disability find little support. Having worked
first-hand with Alzheimer and Dementia patients and having published
extensively on them, Pulugurtha brings a deep understanding of the subject into
her poetry. Underlining these ten poems is a continual sense of search, a
staunch desire to hold on to life while resuscitating the past in memory and a
strict belief in the reclamation of peace as life’s singular treasure. The essential
physical particulars of life are, however, nearly always lost leading to a
perpetual sense of vacuum. Accompanying such agonies of memory are the
omnipotent physical pulls of exhaustion, hunger and sleep that the poems
tenderly chart, echoing in their utter simplicity, an irreparable sense of
grief.
Pulugurtha’s forte, I will choose to advance, is
predominantly, the narrative. Though descriptions loom large over her poetic
canvas, the tripod on which her descriptive camera is placed is the tripod of
narrative whose intention is to tell the tale unerringly as it is. Her poetic
style involves neither proposing nor disposing but recording things as they
manifest themselves in association with each other. It is characteristic of
Pulugurtha’s style that having explored the visual dimensions of a subject in
poetry, she does not dramatically agonize over metaphoric ramifications but
quietly lets the poem rest with an observation that in its profundity,
manifests itself often as an understatement. One poem after another will leave
the reader with an unsettled sense of peace, with a loss biting at the roots of
the heart, with a reconciliation that is tragically incomplete. It is in this
documentation of life’s essential incompleteness that Pulugurtha undeniably accomplishes
her calling as a poet, for did not the great Basho say, “The invincible power
of poetry has reduced me to the condition of a tattered beggar”?