Poetry
The fleeting moment
PARTHA CHATTERJEE
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Amit Chaudhuri, in his poetry and fiction, celebrates the ordinary.
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St. Cyril Road and Other Poems, Amit Chaudhuri, Penguin Viking, 2005, p.78, hardcover, Rs. 200.
AMIT CHAUDHURI has always been a poet. Long before he won acclaim for works of fiction like A Strange and Sublime Address and Afternoon Raag, he has been writing poetry; first in the "voices" of other poets in the English language and then, gradually in his own idiom. In one of his poems entitled "Nissim Ezekiel", after the late Indo-Anglian poet and tireless populariser of Occidental literature, he mocks himself thus:
The man, in a room full of papers
in the Theosophy building,
still young at fifty five
the centre of his small universe,
told me, for fifteen minutes,
that my poems were `derived'
Unintentionally, perhaps, he takes the joke further:
Until seventeen years later in Paris
when he recognized my name
but had forgotten who I was
Nissim Ezekiel was possibly already in the grips of Alzheimer's disease that was to take away the last vestige of his dignity some years later.
Amit Chaudhuri in his poetry and fiction celebrates the ordinary and commonplace, striving for a transformation that might well be magical. In the first poem in this volume, he describes his young father in London:
as Adam in a foggy paradise when Eve
was uncreated, until mother arrived
and something grew complete.
Chaudhuri recalls, perhaps unintentionally, Edward Hopper, the great 20th Century painter of America's loneliness in "Going for a Drive":
I inspired that fragrance. It was everywhere, it was
a wise spirit, a timeless,
unromantic, amor mundi spirit,
haunting the dark cogs and pistons
like despair or love,
or one of those emotions I wouldn't experience with clarity
until long after,
and not even then.
His imagery is spare, even stark in "A Brooklyn Jew in Gaza":
This land was ours
before we were the land's:
the lines might have come to him in a warm breeze.
Or yet again in an altered context in the same poem:
These are his real neighbours not the ones he left behind.
They fill him with rage; he won't give them one inch.
"The Fall of Baghdad", is, by comparison, a dramatic poem; short, terse, poignant.
We slept badly; the French windows shook
and she and I woke from a dream, thinking they
had come, and our city was taken.
The poem ends with a strange twist:
The familiar rooftops
of daytime, hours after midnight, were unwoken.
Chaudhuri's politics is internalised. He does not subscribe to the ideology of any political party. His reactions to life around him are that of a Western educated Indian blessed by the muse of poetry.
There is on the off-chance an epiphany reminiscent of Gerald Manley Hopkins, even, unknown possibly to Chaudhuri himself in Afternoon Raag dedicated to his vocal teacher Pandit Govind Prasad Jaipurwale.
The music-teacher is dying.
He does not know it, but he will be dead in less than a year's time.
He will not see the rain again.
He does not know it. His ignorance of death surrounds him
like a halo, an intimacy with God.
My mother does not know it.
The rain does not know it.
The world is being washed clean by the rain. Something in
us, human but one with the season
is also being washed clean, tear after tear, cloudburst in
silence
He is not a poet of the grand theme like T.S. Eliot but, rather of fleeting experiences that somehow impinge upon our lives and quietly, subtly, bring about a new awareness in our response to our surroundings. In a fairly recent poem, "Residential", he reveals his audio-visual gifts.
the pleasure of glimpsing other people's lives,
in their rectangles opening out onto light,
their different postures that cannot be mimicked,
an aunt sipping tea, a boy reading a book.
The mood changes as the poem progresses.
And, another time, a husband and wife quarrelling,
The wife's voice louder, admonishing, accusing
As if a brisk wall or silence, showing that the children
In us never grow up, but the tomorrows become
harder, more fixed and homes more foreign.
Indo-Anglian poetry was, for a long time, regarded as a joke, until A.K. Ramanujan came along. He had already distinguished himself as a Kannada poet and writer and when he took to writing in English, he set new standards for others to emulate. Following in his footsteps were Arun Kolatkar, genuine man and a poet of substance and Dom Moraes, a glamour boy, but undeniably talented. Amit Chaudhuri is able to find a secure place for himself in this company.
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