POETRY
The spaces of memory
N. VIJAY SAI
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Written over a period of ten years, this collection of poems is a beautiful testament that is also stimulating intellectually.
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Street on the Hill, Anjum Hasan, Sahitya Akademi, 2006, p.64, Rs. 40.
ANJUM HASAN'S first book of poems, Street on the Hill, published by Sahitya Akademi, brings into public light the much-ignored literature from the Northeast. The poems reflect the times of Hasan's childhood and growing up in Shillong. The collection is divided into five themes. And all these themes are to be found in a middle class Indian's day-to-day life.
A highly dexterous work on growing up in a small town and looking at the world from that perspective is the theme, for the most part, of this collection. She writes in free verse, a genre of poetry now gaining much popularity among young Indian poets. The sense of place and belonging is clearly obvious alongside the ambience and recreation that the poems seem to craft.
In a poem titled "Afternoon in the Beauty Parlour", Hasan writes:
A good place to grow old in:
the radio crackling in the corner,
the whores coming in with red nails
on Saturday morning ...
One gets a sense of the space, the people in the place and the whole feel of belonging. And these places are all real and can be seen. The sweet shops, sports goods stores, beauty parlours, Chinese restaurants, hotel bedrooms are the remembered places which seem to stir up into poetic creativity.
One also gets to see an earthy touch in her treatment of people in the poems. All the people in her poems are accessible to you: The knife-grinder, the English teachers in convent schools, pregnant woman, beauticians, "men who run sweet shops in faded black ties", and so on in a manner of people who are less romanticised unlike many depictions of rural folk found in Indian literature.
The theme of "families" is probably a reflection of the various times in which the poet grows up. Here she writes in a tone of being alienated by ethnicity in a land where she is capturing images to tell people who share her sense of solace. She writes in "My Folks":
We have hills in our blood
but end up smelling fat cars on city streets
and garbage strewn under rain.
We speak in stories:
raconteurs, mimics, chroniclers all,
with vast memories and no name-plates.
Some of the best parts of her work are to be found in her re-creations of the beauty of the Northeast and her sense of belonging in the place. In "March" she writes:
This wind is the
language
of indecision that
winter speaks when
it opens its slow mouth
to let April in.
And she continues on a similar note in "November Haiku":
Another winter.
The early dark tumbles from
leaf to cherry leaf... ...
I walk at nightfall
Dreaming my icy fingers
burn your sleep-warmed cheek.
The poet, who now lives in Bangalore, far away from where she grew up, feels a sense of dislocation from a childhood memory. She writes in melancholy and nostalgia about the places and weather that are no longer physical entities. In a poem titled "Home?", the poet's sense of glumness can be felt.
In three hours I will be locking myself
into a padded hotel room where the night
is kept out with high curtains, hard carpets,
trying to fit into the too big bed and almost,
as always, not sure which city this is because
my lotion and toothpaste stand huddled
in one corner of the sink-top and my dreams
are all of incompleteness, hill-sides, rain.
She continues in this tone of separation and longing for the memory of a lost innocence that can only be rediscovered in her proclivity to the place she relates to so much. This pours out in "Rain", when she writes:
You will hear it waking to the roar of a ceiling fan,
in the rustling of dry palm leaves, in pebbles
pouring from a lorry onto the dusty street.
You will hear it in the last aeroplane of the night
(whose sound you will mistake for thunder),
in the alphabets of the birds, in indignant pressure cookers.
You will look for it in the evening, searching for one cloud
among tremendous shadows, at night when it might come
from a great distance and touch the city with a new light.
In all, this collection is a potpourri of emotions clearly expressed. A set of poems written over a period of 10 years, it is a beautiful testament that is intellectually stimulating, technically vigilant and texturally refined.
Vijay Sai is a writer and an independent research scholar living in Bangalore. He may be contacted at:
vijaysai79@gmail.com
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