Poetry
The glow within
KEKI N. DARUWALLA
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Revathy Gopal's is a poetry of family histories and memories.
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Last Possibilities of Light, Revathy Gopal, Writer's Workshop, hardback, p.83, Rs. 150.
REVATHY GOPAL died of cancer on March 7. She was a sensitive and gracious person and a burgeoning poet with considerable promise. Posthumous collections are hard to comment on, and tend to develop into half-obituaries and half-reviews.
Travails of a poet
I had met her first when she won the second prize at the All India Poetry Competition organised by the British Council and the Poetry Society. (She was to win that prize twice). She then sent me some fine stories. The Sahitya Akademi decided to publish her in a scheme where authors with exceptional first books get published (just one author a year). But this applies to only authors under 40, and she, born in 1947, was way beyond that. The book had to be withdrawn from the press. Revathy went to a Mumbai publisher who asked for Rs. 35,000. She sent her mauscript to Ravi Dayal, but Ravi died tragically, also of cancer. Eventually Prof. P. Lal (God bless him) of the Writer's Workshop came to her rescue, as he has with over a thousand poets and playwrights.
One has mentioned all this to show what travails a poet has to go through to get a book out. Things will not get better till people learn to buy poetry as opposed to merely writing it.
Myth and history
Revathy Gopal is fascinated by "history and myth entwined/ like creepers on old stone". Her very first poem, "Earth, Sky and the Trembling Hills", seems a light poetic sketch of the history of some remote spot on the planet (if not the planet itself), where the mythical man "comes like time and history". "The man comes like the sun/ from the east, his body sometimes/ merging with the trees, dark as the teak/ or sal that grows wild in his path". Humanity "runs on the path/ of many migrations"; forest cover vanishes, "subterranean streams run dry", gods "fall tumbling from the sky". Straggling lines of women move further and further away from their homes till they draw
closer and closer to
that dark, dense jungle
they call civilization.
That sounds almost Rousseauesque. References to history are limited to colonial times, to "small towns named after big battles/ Chandernagar and Arcot,/ Madras and Masulipatnam/ names from history texts/ that sent you to sleep in class". In the poem "Picnic at the Zoo", she talks of the statue of Queen Victoria, now placed between "the orang-otan/ and the peanut vendor". When it comes to quirky irony, she milks it true and proper, for, now pigeons strut and boys clamber
on to that capacious lap
from which once flowed
the long tedium of empire
Out of words
The book is divided into four sections — Stranded in Time, I Could Draw Blood, With the Light Trapped Inside and Too Much Blood Blots Out the Sun. The poet says she fashioned herself out of words, "the sounds, and the spells they cast/ ruminative, reflective,/ roll over my tongue". She makes good use of alliteration. She handles myth lightly though there is a full section on Krishna and Radha and Yashodhara. When Krishna tells Radha that "All this flute-playing/ makes my teeth ache", Radha answers, "throw it away, Shyam./ look, here I am,/ I will be your flute./ play me with all your skill/ we will make lovely music together". Hers is a poetry of family histories and memories — doesn't one follow the other? She falls "back through a time-hole into childhood" in the poem "Reclamation". In "Cooking Lesson", a domestic kneads her dough and "Snippets of family history fall into the dough/ like tears; of sisters and cousins,/ journeys and partings,/ a brother who died, an uncle who drank,/ are spun like the lemon-sized ball/ she rolls between her palms". She has two touching poems on meeting a cousin, long lost and one on her sister. A love poem, "Life Sentence", where she weaves herself into the warp of her loved one's days, ends with the lines: `Too many lifetimes have been lost/ in the clutch of memory".
Profound concern
Revathy Gopal has quite a few love poems where, as with her jade Ganesha, the light is trapped inside. Along with this there is always a profound concern for the downtrodden. Whether it is the city spawn who grow up in the slums, eventually to stalk the streets with guns, or the tribal, her concern is evident. She asks: "who will give water/ to the dying Gond/ with his eyes turned inward/ to other skies". And she found the universe "insensible to our pain", and scorned our search for messiahs.
In the poem "Family secrets", she says, "and death will come anyway,/ perhaps raucously/ like an inebriated guest, or quietly/ like a burglar after midnight,/ and perhaps he will find us ready/ or perhaps not". From what I have heard, despite her zest for life, she was ready.
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