Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 2, Number 1. May 2019. ISSN: 2581-7094
Cities: Two
Perspectives, Poems by Gopal Lahiri and Sunil Sharma
New Delhi: Authors Press, 2018. Rs250; $12.
--- John Thieme
As Sunil Sharma says, in a confessional
comment that precedes his poems in this collection, cities both fascinate and repel,
while remaining inescapable for their inhabitants. Cities engulf us, infect us
and refresh us, prompting a myriad of moods. In many ways it has ever been thus
in poetry about the city. Baudelaire’s Paris, Eliot’s London, Sandburg’s
Chicago: each of these opens up a unique window on the city, reflecting and
creating its dreams and nightmares, albeit with a tendency to tip the balance
towards the latter. And in India? Well, pace
Gandhianism, contemporary India is as much a collection of megalopolises as a
country of villages, and Mumbai, the nation’s most populous city and the focal
point for the poems in this volume, is a metropolis that unforgivingly embodies
the visceral extremes of urban India, its impossibilities and its achievements.
Poetry about Mumbai is, of course,
nothing new. In a short article published in 1996, R. Raj Rao discussed more
than thirty poets – among them Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Eunice De
Souza, Arun Kolatkar and Dilip Chitre – who had engaged with what at one point
he calls “the madhouse” of Bombay. Nevertheless, encompassing the
contradictions of Mumbai in verse remains a major challenge, particularly
because of the rapidity of the pace of change in recent years. Gopal Lahiri and
Sunil Sharma, the two poets serendipitously paired together in Cities: Two Perspectives, take up the
task in carefully crafted verse that brings Mumbai alive on the printed page
through its attentiveness to the minutiae of what Suketu Mehta has termed India’s
“maximum city”. At the same time Lahiri and Sharma’s verse makes highly
effective use of metonymic imagery as a vehicle for conveying their responses to
the urban cartographies they evoke.
At first sight, Lahiri seems to be less
a commentator on city life than an observer of its characteristics, a
minimalist who develops his portrait of Mumbai through closely observed vignettes:
Padlocked
shacks, windowless tin boxes,
Excrement
on the road. The homeless,
Naked,
slum children are there on the road,
Waiting
for the clouds to drain the last drop of rain. (“Thirst”)
But cumulatively the force of these
observations adumbrates a vision of the city that is laden with menace, and
occasionally this erupts to the surface:
Each stone scripts stories.
Each
bird exchanges sinister secrets.
In
the city you grow up,
all
the shades of green pick weeds
Waiting
to destroy the world. (“Still Surviving”)
Sharma complements this with more
direct reference to the yawning chasm between the bustling world of the city’s
commuters and the squalid lives of its destitutes:
A
bearded man
stained
clothes, few plastic bottles […]
part
of the broken street furniture
for
the busy middle-class men and women! (“Apathy”)
Sharma’s poems show these two
groups inhabiting insulated parallel worlds that never touch. Elsewhere he
writes:
While
passing by a mound of garbage
Along
a stinking open drain
Citizens
would cover noses with silk kerchiefs,
Hurrying
fast from that site and repulsive odour;
Oblivious
of a lone hut of tarpaulin […]
A
rough shelter to a family of the exiled souls
At
home in that stinking dump. (“Stink!”)
The reference to exile in this poem
suggests the anomie experienced by those who have migrated to the city, but it
also speaks to a more fundamental existential predicament from which there is
no escape. India’s journey from country innocence to city experience is not the
central theme of Lahiri and Sharma’s Cities
and yet several poems by the two writers cast a nostalgic eye in the rear-view
mirror to look back to a time when effluence and the insouciant neglect of the
poverty-stricken were not the order of the day.
This comes across vividly in an image
that recurs in the work of both poets: the trope of birds circling the skies,
adrift in an environment in which buildings have usurped the place of the organic.
Lahiri’s variations on this include:
In
a hyperbolic move
the
yellow bird flares up
with
the flash of wings
falling,
turning away
makes
her own path,
for
a long time it is trying to
carve
out something that is lost […] (“Skyline”)
and:
A
bird is tossed up unknowingly
After
bath in frigid water
An
earthly reminder,
Beneath
the spine,
Harsh
realities are not far away. (“My City”)
For Lahiri, such avian behaviour is
both a perceived reality and an index of more general displacement and loss of
habitat in the overpopulated built environment. Sharma writes in a similar
vein, but again his use of the image tends to provide a more direct critique of
the over-development of Mumbai and its environs. He contrasts the unceasing
relentlessness of building work with the disappearance of bird song:
Ubiquitous!
The
drill sound. […]
Poor
replacement of bird song, once heard in the leafy Mumbai. (“Drilling”)
and he conveys the seemingly
intractable loss of the natural world by drawing an analogy between birds
questing for a place to build a nest and similarly dispossessed human migrants:
Spotted!
A kingfisher drenched. […]
The
multi-coloured bird, sitting high there, on that drab piece of insulated wire,
her gentle swing –
looking
for a possible nesting place, like fellow migrants and numb marginals, driven
out by the system, in that soul-less desert! (“Nests, Lost”)
Elegy is implicit in many of Sharma’s
poems and occasionally it becomes overt:
There
were verdant hills and trees
Where
healthy kids played once […]
And
returned to their village
Refreshed
in the evenings;
Now
–
There
is no village,
No
hills or trees,
A
dark river flows,
Mere
muddy strip,
Surrounded
by gleaming
High-rises
everywhere,
And
lot of marble-concrete,
your
pricey suburbs.
And
an irreparable loss –
A
lost childhood and soothing green. (“Requiem”)
and when Lahiri writes of loss, he
too can cast a nostalgic look back to childhood:
In
those days my mother spoke rivers
Meandering
into soft tears.
And
finally
Chanted
mantras in the Ganesh temple
Comforted
and cared. (“Childhood”)
In such passages, the individual
loss of a holistic, green childhood is a correlative for the loss of natural
habitat to urban sprawl. Ultimately, though, as Laurence Durrell’s famously put
it, at the beginning of The Alexandria
Quartet, “Only the city is real” and, for all their reservations about the
inequities and exclusions of Mumbai, both Lahiri and Sharma provide a homage to
it by making it the centre-piece of their affective meditations on contemporary
society. Like the city itself, this is an inescapable volume, a book to be
treasured and reread, a work that deserves a place in the pantheon of modern
urban poetry.