VERSE
Poet of unhappiness
RAJI NARASIMHAN
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Surendran's works are telling examples of creative link-ups.
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Portraits Of The Space We Occupy; C. P. Surendran, HarperCollins India, Rs. 250.
SURENDRAN'S is the poetry of savagery: not the savagery of animals, instinct-driven, quick to be assuaged. It is human savagery, long-in-the-making, slow to rise and venomous with malice aforethought.
Telling examples are the poems to his father — a writer wedded to Marxism in doomed matrimony — with whom he apparently had a stormy and unbreakable relationship. In "Rout", for instance, he peeps over his father's shoulder as he sits writing, and visualises with bitter glee his "hands shake in time's fetters". That phrase, occurring in the last line of the poem, is a binding phrase throwing into relief the moodscape of the poem.
Recurring feature
This strategy of making the last phrase of the poem its centrepiece is a recurring feature of Surendran's poetry. It consists of an adroit placing of the phrase, from where it links back to an almost forgotten thought or image occurring earlier in the poem. It is a creative link-up. It sets the essence of the poet's set of mind unfurl through and over the poem.
In "Highway", the street urchins of Bombay come out to beg during a halt by the traffic. "We kiss the glass burnished with our breath/suck syllables from its blazoned face," declares the poetic proxy for the urchins, in mock-pathetic tones, and reasons further that: "Brittle things must break at entreating touch". From this breakage, the reasoning goes on, will come into view "armoured knights" and "silken queens" nestled in the plush interiors behind the glass windows that the urchins are busy kissing, and "purse strings will loosen".
But the traffic screeches back to life and the urchins sink deep on their knees to let the "cavalcade of kings pass". Those four words are the last segment of the last line of the poem. Dipped in irony, they demolish the mock pathos and proclaim an open vengefulness.
The savagery is often turned inward; toward one's own self in masochistic revelling. "You and I are dust/It's nothing... The thread of blood/That ties us up in knots is nothing."
It is a pretty weighty statement — that dust and nothingness are the only two certainties of life. It is also a personal tenet heard all along in these poems. And again, it gains its poetic resonance by the strategy of placing. In "Penance", the opening lines create nostalgia. "This morning again I was drunk with longing for you." This is followed by a detailed build up of reverie and thought elisions relevant to the reality behind the nostalgia. "What I won was not wholly without value:/ Palaces of betrayed kings aflutter/With bat-wings of echoes."
Ferocity of imagination
The crash into consciousness and waking up follows. The din and decibel power of the words here, combined with the ferocity of imagination sweep us into a co-imaginative frame of mind, far removed from the simple, everyday nostalgia of the poem's opening lines. The ferocity continues to the last but one line, which says: "I swore myself into a kind/of penance". What penance? We wait for further ferocity. But the line continues as the beginning of the last para, and resolves into the clinching statement: "Abjured dreams".
That two-word final para has to connect in a deep U-turn to the beginning of the poem where the idea of dreams is introduced. You don't make the connection instantly. But you do, after the first moments of puzzlement. The reverberation of words subsides, and you hear a sane, considered re-statement of the proposition that dust and nothingness are the only two certainties of life. And with this enhancement of the channels of hearing, Surendran becomes, for the reader, a poet of unhappiness from an unhappy man.
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