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An ode to villages
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‘Indian Villages’ is a compilation of poems and paintings
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Artistic take Victoria with one of her paintings
Indian Villages, a book of poems and paintings by artist Victoria A. M. is a veritable tribute to the Kerala village, landscape and tradition. Victoria who has been writing poems and painting for the last 30 years came up with the book after she lost the manuscripts of several of her poems.
Indian Villages is a small, diffident attempt with just 11 poems and works, as if Victoria is unsure about the product.
Constant factors
Women and children, rustic life, lost innocence, hardships and love form the staple of her poems. Sensitive as the artist is she draws out her thoughts and pens them as well.
Her poems are pure simple thoughts, about her anguish at the new life away from the village. Most of them are reminiscences of her before life and the longing, lingering is penned sensitively. Fruits, flowers, rivers, trees, fish and fowl are the images she constantly harks back too.
Besides images there are very sensitive feelings as in ‘Childhood’ where she writes, “A thousand dreams unfold / As the sweet pomegranates bloom.” Water lily, Vales, Malayalanadu, ‘When Pushkaramulla blooms’ all are dioramic pictures of the life she loves but lived earlier.
Now in the city, Victoria escapes to those glades in these poems and paintings. In the work along with ‘When Pushkarmulla blooms’ she is one of the five sisters sitting beside the white blossoms, comparing it to the visit of a Goddess. ‘Mind’ is Victoria’s anguish over the struggle of two women catching scaly fish by hand and storing them in a pot. She paints the scene in colours too.
In Nishagandhi her grief compared to that of a flower being sucked off the nectar she questions “Who would know my sorrow/ At this phenomenon?”
Solace
The book is one that you can reach out to when you are caught by a pang of grief, a thought, a voice, a scene that was and the overwhelming memories. The writer and the artiste combine here to provide solace for the restive mind.
Victoria was assisted by George Thundaparambil, a writer and Margaret, her friend and a teacher at Britto High School in bringing out the book.
PRIYADERSHINI S.
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