You Can’t Close Your Eyes For a Sec

THEY DON’T MAKE JUST ANYBODY a Penguin Modern Classic. “Born in Lahore in 1947”—I quote from the solid paragraph of author description, bristling impressively with the italicised titles and dates of his many books—“Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the author of four previous collections of poetry,” and “two of translation,” notably Songs of Kabir; he has also edited the “ground-breaking” (the adjective is applied only to the first of these books, but could well describe all three) Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Poets, which appeared in 1992, An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English, which arrived just over a decade later, and the Collected Poems in English of his close friend and poetic peer, Arun Kolatkar. (Published in 2010, it was Mehrotra’s Kolatkar which first introduced me to Indian verse in English.) Mehrotra’s collected essays, Partial Recall, arrived in 2011, the same year as the Kabir translations; and here, finally, is his own Collected. So his importance to the world of Indian letters (which he also criticises plentifully, for its forgetfulness and vanity) is indisputable—but the verse itself remains to be analysed. What kind of poet is he?

Seeking a description of Mehrotra’s poetry, we might consider his introduction to the Oxford India Anthology, now in its sixteenth reprinting: “I have wanted to reveal through a particular choice of poets and poems the sharp-edged quality of Indian verse.” These poems dissect, can wound, and don’t match up with the exuberant, boisterous, globally marketable style of much Indian fiction in English. Salman Rushdie described his hectic chutnification of the English language; the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali found biryani the correct metaphor. Sharp-edged is something different. The verse style Mehrotra’s talking about, and which he himself practises, doesn’t stretch the language to its bursting point. Instead, it creates of the existing rhythms and grammatical elegancies of well-written English a uniquely compressed authority. What’s Indian about this verse, that is, isn’t evinced by an obvious excess, an over-the-topness which fizzes, seethes and may finally cloy; nor by a profusion of exotic details. (When these do arrive, it’s ironic: “If I told you the names of the mango / Varieties we had here,” drily remarks the disenfranchised tenant-narrator of ‘Number 16’, “you’d think I was / Speaking from an imaginary textbook / On horticulture.”) These poems resist overt displays of nationality, and have a minimalist rather than maximalist distinctiveness. Acerbic, saddened, they arrive in clear spurts and outline a bullshit-free zone.

What do we make, say, of ‘January’, from the 1982 collection Distance in Statute Miles:

The gate wide open; chairs on the lawn;

Circular verandahs; a narrow kitchen;

High-ceilinged rooms; arches; alcoves; skylights.

My house luminous; my day burnt to ash.

This small and perfectly-formed poem depends on the versatility of the semi-colon, which can both divide the items of a list, and separate the terms of a binary opposition. As with all short poems, what is excluded or bracketed out performs a vital absence, and it’s also striking how the sound of “rooms” is dropped into “luminous,” troubling that rather poetic adjective. My essay takes its title from the last line of ‘Looking Out’, a new poem in this Collected, which connects with semi-colons water beads on willow branches, squirrels on the verandah, parrots in flight, and finally

The spotted owlet in the mango tree,

Looking in through the open window where I

Sit at a jade table looking out, in a house

Where nothing happens that so much happens

You can’t close your eyes for a sec.

The house may serve as a metaphor for India—“O house by the mill we’re trapped in,” remarks Mehrotra in a poem dated 26 June 1975, the day Indira Gandhi declared the state of emergency—but this lyric also recalls, and reverses, the phrasing of his recent interview in Mint, where he complains of Allahabadis that “everyone thinks that it’s all happening here, when actually there’s nothing happening here.” ‘Looking Out’ describes not Mehrotra’s gardenless flat in that city but his house in Dehradun. Despite the monitory title, it insists on the presence, not the absence, of the real thing; a riotousness-in-quietness, an unmetropolitan locus of more-than-personal, even spiritual meaning, captured with a burst of pace and a whip-crack vernacular finish reminiscent of the American verse (the Beats, William Carlos Williams, the spoken stuff) which has nurtured him.

“We belong to the houses we live in,” writes Mehrotra in ‘Hoopoe’, and these buildings are important to his work. He evokes their insides and outsides, and his own locatedness, with a delicate appraising eye, a sureness which never grows too comfortable. Both reposeful and alert, the poet keeps his finger on the pulse of life. I mention American verse to make the point that Mehrotra is—pun intended—at home in verse enriched by multiple traditions. In ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes’, a seminal essay (that adjective is desiccated, wince-worthy, but necessary in this case) published in the early 1980s, he complicates Rajagopal Parthasarathy’s limited understanding of AK Ramanujan’s work. Ramanujan wrote in different languages, and for that critic, the authenticity of his verse in English depends on the presence of a buried native tradition. “For the model to hold we have to agree”—it’s a delight to watch Mehrotra’s wickedly sparkling critical intelligence at work—“that Ramanujan arranges Tamil and Kannada in the lower strata, English in the upper, and each time he chooses to write he descends, caged canary bird in hand, into the thickly-seamed coal pit of the mother tongue.” This “inflexible, stratified order” must be replaced with a more complex, open-ended, and less hierarchical understanding of the international and “multilingual sensibility”: Mehrotra links Ramanujan with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges.

We also require an understanding of the overlap between poetic and critical style. For as Amit Chaudhuri remarks in his introduction to this Collected, the “wonderfully scolding, imprecatory, cutting voice” (that sharp edge again!) which Mehrotra brings to bear on the corruption of national book culture is also there in Songs of Kabir—his translations of that mischievous mystic are unbuttoned, eclectic, merging in active speech present and past—as well as his own verse. Hence the sting in the tail of both ‘January’ and ‘Looking Out’, where listed detail emits in the final line either a devastating or renewing insight. John Donne said the force of a poem lies in the conclusion, which “is as the impression of the stamp, and that is it that makes it current.” This coin-metaphor is literalised in another short, snappy poem, ‘For a Slave King 2’; unremembered for his reign (Delhi, 1211, reads the epigraph) of hardly a year, still this Ozymandias-figure had time to “strike a copper coin, / Bearing on the obverse the legend, / ‘The victorious Aram Shah, the Sultan’.” (Chaudhuri also observes the poet’s interest in “accidentality,” whether that refers, with sadness and scorn, to how books and people—there are touching poems here about Mehrotra’s father, a dentist—drop quickly out of memory, or acknowledges a type of paradoxically specific and universal transience.)

These sharp closing twists also occur in Mehrotra’s critical prose, as when he ends a paragraph with a note on “Aurobindo Ghose, who spent the last years of his life composing a worthless epic of 24,000 lines”; or (bringing verse and prose-endings together here) caps an amiable summary of Jayanta Mahapatra’s sexual ‘Hunger’ by telling us the poem “is, however, spoiled a little towards the end when, in a careless moment, Mahapatra compares the girl’s legs to worms.” Nor is the device always destructive. The closing sentence of Mehrotra’s final endnote on his Kabir translations refers to the “shining nothingness” which “sums up, as well as anything can, Kabir’s unclouded view of human life. It’s a view he repeated in poem after poem, almost obsessively.” After this, four-fifths of page 145 is blank. We’re left to ponder Kabir’s repetitions, and whether they express a personal hang-up or a spiritual truth.

What fascinates in all these examples is the refusal of unified tone; an awareness of the poem as a bundle of impulses; the mixture of lingering sensitive focus and impatient brush-off. The arc of the poet-critic’s interest, even his interestingness, acknowledges itself and never fails to prod, amuse, surprise. Academics studying world literature could learn much from Mehrotra, whose tonal variety is an act of resistance to a wafflingly untroubled and therefore dullard discursiveness. But learn too much and you’re done for, because his is a terminal language, sceptical of itself, whose words seek to vanish in an instant of illuminating surprise. Kabir’s ulatbamsi or “upside-down poems,” in which, Mehrotra has it, “language disrupts communication, forcing us to think in new ways”—“There’s a fire / Raging in the ocean […] You’re the cage, / I the parrot inside, / Watching death’s cat / Meowing outside”— bear comparison with the early surrealism of his 1976 debut, Nine Enclosures:

Talking of animals I’ve seen cats

Sulking beside the sea

There lies at its bottom

A submarine full of mice

This sequence appears in the Collected Poems with its title changed from ‘Eleven Cross-Sections’ to ‘Songs of the Good Surrealist’, which Mehrotra tells us was the original title: “for me, who started writing in the 1960s, the discovery of surrealism helped resolve the awful contradiction between the world I wanted to write about, the world of dentists and chemist shops, and the language, English, I wanted to write in.” The restored title reveals his surrealism as, however, always a form of irony or pastiche, and we observe its bizarrerie mutate into wisdom: “Mornings I fell from trees are poisoned wells.”

Introducing the Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English, Mehrotra intriguingly discusses the scholar William Jones’s “universalist and surreal ideas of race.” My italics; “surreal” drops out when this piece is reprinted in the essay collection Partial Recall, perhaps because the word has been imprecisely used. But in describing as “surreal” the generous racial theories of the man known as “Oriental Jones”—who came to India in the eighteenth century as a supreme court judge, learned Sanskrit to better administer, but then grew besotted and discovered Proto-Indo-European, the shared ancestor of several Eastern and Western languages—Mehrotra aligns that adjective with a wild mixing of races and cultures, and the “notion of a common homeland for mankind, from which it had centuries ago migrated to different parts of the globe.” And what happens in his poetry is that ultimately the surprising juxtapositions are those resulting from colonial processes—the weirdness is already there in India, it doesn’t have to be cunningly and defamiliarisingly engineered by the poet. He finds a way of apparently jotting down, quite simply, the absurd facts, while actually writing deceptively crafted poems. My favourite of this kind in the Collected is ‘On the Death of a Sunday Painter’, which again I quote in full:

He smoked a cherry-wood pipe, knew all about cannas,

And deplored our lack of a genuine fast bowler.

My uncle called his wife Soft Hands.

Once in 1936 as he sat reading Ulysses

In his Holland Hall drawing-room, a student walked in.

Years later I read him an essay on D.H. Lawrence

And the Imagists. He listened,

Then spoke of Lord Clive, the travels of Charles Doughty,

‘My dear young fellow . . .’

I followed the mourners on my bicycle

And left early. His friends watched the cremation

From the portico of a nearby house.

John Ashbery described Elizabeth Bishop as a “writer’s writer’s writer”; I’m tempted to call this the poet’s poet’s poem. It looks so easy and yet the sentence-arrangement, the rhythm, the manipulation of the conflicting tissues and time-signatures of anecdote is all so wonderfully precise. (There’s a wistful new poem here, ‘The Sting in the Tail’—a phrase this essay has borrowed, in discussing last lines—about reading Ashbery in Allahabad, “a glass of tepid / Fennel-flavoured sherbet by your side.” He may well be an influence on Mehrotra’s more surreal poems, but this one ends with the concrete ‘thwack!’ of a slapped mosquito; a rejoinder, perhaps, to what Seamus Heaney once described as the consciously inadequate “centrally heated daydream” of Ashbery’s verse.)

Mehrotra’s Sunday painter is Rabindra Nath Deb, a university colleague of the uncle who appears in the third line. Both men taught English—that Deb also painted is typical of many cultured Bengalis—and Mehrotra’s uncle is mentioned in the introduction to the Collected Poems, during its discussion of surrealism:

How do you write about an uncle in a wheelchair in the language of skylarks and nightingales? It’s as though I’d said to myself that since I cannot write about these things in English, let me do so in French, so to speak. The irony that the uncle in question was himself an Oxford-educated professor of English has struck me only now.

Those Romantic “skylarks and nightingales” stand in for a received, an unexamined understanding of what poetry is supposed to be like—exported to the colonies and obsequiously imitated by nineteenth-century Indian poets. (My Sri Lankan mother was made, in the twentieth, to memorise at school Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, although she had no idea what a daffodil was.) Seeking an alternative style, Mehrotra hasn’t written ‘On the Death of a Sunday Painter’ as a surreal poem, but in a simultaneously lucid and disjointed English which represents an alternative solution to this problem. The snippets have their integrity but the order in which events occur is uncertain, and why they’re important enough to mention—“Once… a student walked in”—isn’t self-evident. My dear young fellow: Deb still speaks a mannered Oxbridge English, and this antiquated, emulous sound bite is, poetically-speaking, a structural feature, for its ellipsis allows for the jump-cut to the funeral, and also suggests the vanished lifetime of an idiosyncratic personality. (Another example, as in the note on Kabir, of language tailing off, of our reaching, as Wittgenstein has it, the point whereof we cannot speak, and must remain silent.) We move from a smoked pipe to the cremated man; from fast bowlers to “his wife Soft Hands”; from high Modernism (uninterested in Lawrence, Deb retreats into the past) to the inauguration of the Raj, or an echo of it, anyway.

For the mention of Colonel Robert Clive, and of Deb receiving visitors, sets up a resonance with Benjamin West’s 1774 painting of Lord Clive receiving from the Moghul the Grant of the Duanney. This work records the signing of the treaty of Allahabad, which marked the beginning of British rule: reproducing it in the Illustrated History, Mehrotra mentions the “touch of farce,” for some “of the Englishmen appear to be talking in whispers to each other, as do some of the Indians. The reality was quite different: Clive actually received ‘the Duanney’ in his tent… the emperor’s throne, far from being a canopied, oriental affair, was in fact Clive’s dining table surmounted by an armchair.” Mehrotra’s elegy for the Sunday painter, his life textured with colonial aspiration and perhaps also genuine achievement, may remember this painting. It recreates the scene but with that Mehrotran spin. Knowing “all about cannas,” Deb may have told Mehrotra, his student, the well-known story—a piece of untrivial trivia—about the hard black seeds from this plant, which are also called “Indian shot,” being used as ammunition by British troops during the rebellion of 1857.

‘Two Lakes,’ also from Distance in Statute Miles, reveals once again the stylistic control with which Mehrotra attends to the colonial period and its legacies:

The second lake lies

At the foot of the hill and is clean

To the point of invisibility. On one side

Is the club where dead Englishmen

Sit down on tigers and play bridge.

Specks of dust drift through their moustached faces.

In the billiard-room the table is still

Intact, while the stained kitchen knife

Has appeared in the region’s

Folklore.

The first line-break, on the ambiguous word “lies,” stresses truth’s inevitable, as well as insidiously engineered, distortions (personal, colonial, industrial, poetic) and disappearances, as does the last one, which isolates the rich word ‘folklore’. This word normally describes the unimpinged-upon and spontaneous mythos of indigenous communities. Not so here: the “stained kitchen knife” is presumably blood-stained—repeating sounds focus our attention on that adjective, we peer at it up close—and although the English ghosts are presented as a cinematic special-effect, Mehrotra’s sometime surrealism once again grows serious.

The phantom geography of this landscape allows, again, for the sense of the poem as an arrangement, or an existing pattern artfully and tellingly dishevelled. Poetic form is rarely discussed in the work of Indian poets. This is either because their poems, and books of poems, simply drop out of sight, they’re neglected; or since Indian literature in English is examined only as a species of avidly historical utterance which it would somehow be trivial to also appreciate as literary art. (There is the danger here of thinking of these works as merely symptomatic: a native wound opening its lips to utter its origin.)

But really the distinction is false, for as these poems show, Mehrotra’s verse shaping is crucial to how it attends to real-world events; also to how his serendipitous cosmopolitan engagement with authors from many time-periods and cultures avoids passive consumerism (in the dog-eat-dog world of postcolonial criticism, accusations of bad faith come at you thick and fast!) through the application of an actively questioning and reordering intelligence. His every stylistic felicity provides another evidence of this gift. Take, for instance, the first line of this translation of the Hindi poet Suryakant Tripathi, popularly known as Nirala:

Those whose heart’s thatch

Hasn’t caught fire, never find

The treasures buried there.

‘Inscription,’ from The Transfiguring Places, published in 1998, describes the arrival in the night, “unbidden, unsigned,” of a line of “eight memorable / Syllables” Mehrotra didn’t record and sadly forgot: here the lovely impatient urgency of the four monosyllables is something one is glad not to have missed. There’s the flow of “those” into “whose,” the bookending alliteration of “those” and “thatch”; the refusal, even, of the crude possible rhyme of “thatch” and “catch”; and the interaction of “fire” with both “find” and the disguised slant-rhyme “there,” which appears to confirm the epigram.

This concentrating focus is one with Mehrotra’s pointed authoritativeness—he writes economically, with a care for impact, and shifts from being a surreal to a historical to a philosophical poet in registering the limits of language, and literary effectiveness. The adjective I want is tidy, if you could remove from that word the pejorative associations of smallness, harmlessness, pettiness; Mehrotra has evolved a kind of unreconciled, rather than smug, neatness. There is too much verbiage in the world, he seems to say, and I will add to it only what truly matters; and in any case my project is deconstructive, it helps us find, it doesn’t crowd out the truth. In Nine Enclosures, he speaks on behalf of the Ganges with a Whitmanian expansiveness: “I go out into the world / I am the world / I am nations, cities, people / I am the pages of an unbound book.” Yet ‘Songs of the Ganga’ really matches up with his other work (notably, it conjures the mystical accents of Kabir) in the river’s scepticism about existing arrangements and assumptions—“I make two lines in the sand / And say they are unbreakable walls”—and its canny survivalism:

From smoke I learn disappearance

From the ocean unprejudice

From birds

How to find a rest house

In the storm

From the leopard

How to cover the sun

With spots

In a tale from Kipling’s Just So Stories, the leopard gets its spots to better disguise itself for hunting. Inverting the story, Mehrotra’s river-voice is playful, wary, self-constructed—even a little bit vulnerable: “In summer I tend watermelons / And in flood I stay / Near the postman’s house.” This is the poet—fact-attentive, sentence-conscious, image-curious, rhythm-considerate; confirmed by this Collected as a creator, as well as a critic, of provocative originality—who, in ‘Paradise Flycatcher’, admires the “unvictimized, unnoticed” love-life of birds untroubled by the “boundary-fence,” with “no feathered / Father or brother / Beheading them in the street / In an honour killing”; and, in a handful of new poems reminiscent of his friend Arun Kolatkar, tenderly describes the lives of working-class people, such as an ironing lady whose “clothes pile up, / Each fold a stanza break, / Till she’s folded the last one, / Finishing the manuscript.” Who, in ‘Dream-Figures in Sunlight’, wakes up “in the city where Kipling lived,” and prays:

              A hundred, a thousand

Years from now, may the sap-filled bough

Still print its shadow on running water,

And a dusty March wind blow its leaves

Towards a page of Kipling, a home-grown page.