Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 9, Number 1. May 2026. ISSN: 2581-7094
Em No Nahin
By Tarun Bhartiya, Yaarbal Books, 2025
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This is not going to be an
objective book review if there ever is something called objectivity. This is a
friend reading the posthumous book of a friend, the death of whom is still too
raw. When I held the newly arrived copy
of Em No Nahin in my hands my first thought was that this is a book he
had never held. As a genre this reminds me of Rosaldo's The Day of Shelley’s
Death (2013), Shaun Tan’s Arrival (2006) and João Biehl’s Life in a
Zone of Social Abandonment (2013) but it is different. The
book immediately takes you into a panorama of ‘Death House’, dark cloud in the
sky, the photograph, a windshield view of a couple of houses on either side of
a dusty road, then photograph of feet -of men and women standing atop what
looks like concrete coffins – the onlookers. This is how we are informed early
on in the book that, “Kong Spillity
Lyngdoh Langrin of Domiasiat, in Meghalaya’s Khasi Hills is no more.” (pg.11).
This is death upon death for anyone who knows/knew Tarun. I have not figured
out the tense yet of how to refer to him. The aesthetics is funerary, solemn
and defiant, there is a boar or a pig prepared for the feast. The book travels
back in time from this point to tell the reader about Kong Spillity and her
village of seven households. King Spillity’s funerary procession and an
assembly of children carrying wreaths of
orchid with the rain slanting on them. To remember her is to remember defiance.
The book urges us to gaze at the landscape through Kong's eyes – how does one
imagine richness? At first I turned the page and saw bleakness, desolation ,
then I saw beauty, the dark rain-threatening clouds as if the skies were
weeping, then lightness. With its minimal texts the photographic images remain
central akin to his earlier work Unaddressed Postcards from Khasi-Jaintia Hills (2021). A photograph
of concrete pipes lie awaiting. At times you are caught unaware by unexpected
humour as Tarun writes about managing “to con his way into an exposure trip to
Jadugoda… A senior Bengali technocrat of UCIL liked me; you know how it is
about culture etc. I haven't talked so much Tagore in my life” (pg.77). These
notes on the margin in Khasi and English – terse ethnographic vignettes tell us
of the incredulous mismatch. The state asks – what is displacement for people
who have none? While the book urges us not to enumerate the irreducibles– river, land, freedom. Multiplicity of genres
blend together – slogans at protest sites, graffiti, poetry, an ode – “I claw
open/ Domiasiat/ extract Uranium/ with my bare hands/ Yellow/ Cakes … -
Crytografik Street Poets” (pg. 107) is the people's rant, as Tarun would have described it, against extraction
and extractive regimes. The book ends with Caldwell Manners's photograph of
Tarun sitting on the backrest of a concrete bench, perhaps a bus stop, at least
a resting spot of sorts looking at you through the lens of his camera, face
squinted in concentration so it seems he is smiling, or he really is – “I do
politics” and how! The “Dkar, Mayang, Vai, Diku…”, the outsider's ode to Kong Spillity and
people's campaign, is an elegy for all of us who will hold on to his anger,
rant, and poetry at the margins of this book. Em is Angela’s farewell to
Tarun and her refusal to let that politics die.
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