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POETRY

Epiphanic moments

How does one journey from opacity to transparency? How does a barricade turn into a window? A screen into a lens? At what point does cloth turn to light, wall to paper, paper to tissue, tissue to skin, skin to breath?

These are some of the questions that preoccupy Imtiaz Dharker in her new book, The Terrorist at my Table.

I have admired Dharker’s poetry for a long time: its unfussiness and poise, its controlled emotional thermostat. But with her last two books, I feel kinship. And a deep fascination with the questions she asks, and the way she asks them, blending the moral, political and existential into an unmannered but quietly crafted poetics.

In her previous work, I Speak for the Devil, the recurrent theme was displacement and the mood, exultant. The poetry saw unsettlement not as exile but as a condition of multiple citizenship; the poet-seeker not as fugitive but as fr ee-spirited traveller. In the new book, the concerns deepen, seeking connections not merely across culture but across history — Moorish Spain, Indian maritime labour in Britain in the 1930s. The final section — a surreal, hair-raising rickshaw ride, careening across time and space, historic and mythic, peopled by characters both individual and archetypal — integrates these strands into a single vast celebration of the world as womb, the stranger as self, lunacy as life, mayhem as miracle, and home as one long perpetual hurtle in the present continuous.

Familiar Dharker tropes are discernible here. There is the fascination with the “list poem”, with the everyday detritus of our lives (“Thrown Away”, “Accepted Offerings”), which one recalls from Postca rds from God. There is also the moment of “recognition” in which the identity of the unknown person — whether a survivor of the Mumbai bomb blasts, as in Postcards, or a medieval woman in the moonlit gardens of t he Alhambra, as in this book — becomes one’s own.

But there is something new as well. There is greater sensuousness, which, I believe, makes the abiding political concern in Dharker’s work that much more effective. This richness of texture is particularly evident in a sub-section entitled “Remember Andalus”: “The juice tasted of gardens/ I had never seen, voluptuous/ with myrtle, lemon, jasmine,/ and alive with parrots’ wings.” The nostalgia turns more lyrical: “Breath that comes and goes/ as if it were a visitor….I will know I left my breath behind./ They will say I sighed.”

There also seems to be a greater playfulness at work, particularly in the last section which takes us on a cosmic romp on that wild, wilful, utterly inimitable vahana of our times: the auto rickshaw. A “mad driver” and & #8220;lost rider” go on a crazy picaresque adventure, encountering unicorns and melons from Samarkand, only to find “no demon, no terror, no forked tongue”, but “only the face I know,/ my neighbour, my sister”.

Dharker’s poetry offers provisional strategies for survival in a distrustful, violent and challenging world. Her answers seem to lie in simplifying needs; adapting to change; re-learning the gift of gratitude; learning to leave “my life unlocked”; learning “to cherish the ephemeral”; giving thanks for “a day/ offered like an unbroken egg/ still alive with possibility”; and learning to trust that “even the unknown path/ will tow us home”.

The gasping, terrified passenger learns to deal with the buffeting rickshaw ride of life, not by praying for a halt (which, in any case, would be impossible!), but by learning to grow accustomed “to travelling on the faultlines/ of daily miracles”.

If there is a declaration of the poet’s credo, it is probably in the last lines of “Myth”, where she speaks movingly of “The grace of the familiar,/ The blessed./ The everyday”.

And perhaps it is even more effective for its succinctness in the last line of “Glass House”: “Here,” she says simply, “Look through me”.

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