Where I Live

Arundhathi Subramaniam is one of the finest poets we have in India.She writes in English and has published several collections of poetry and a book on spiritualism. I mentioned that she writes in English later and that she is a fine poet first because very often we use language as a way of creating hierarchy in India. For example regional writing is considered secondary to writing in English or Hindi thereby creating compartmentalized judgment when it comes to assessing a work of art. So when I say that Arundhathi is one of the finest poets we have in India I meant inclusive of all Indian  languages.

Her major works of poetry are published in three volumes, 'On Cleaning Bookshelves'  and two volumes of 'Where I live'. I have yet not read her books on spiritualism particularly what she has written on Swami Sadguru of Coimbatore but I am a great admirer of her poetry. While she has a very structured style and very objective choice of words which creates a distance from her subject she lets you peep into her heart slowly but surely. And at the end of a poem a bell  rings and everything falls into place. No tears flowing down the cheeks and shouting from the roof tops for her. A very common symptom of emotional poetic expression.

My  wife C.S.Lakshmi (Ambai) who also writes fiction in Tamil and I have been friends with Arundhathi Subramaniam for many years now and for many years we lived in adjoining buildings from where we could look at each other's windows from a distance both  our flats being on the third floor. She later moved  to another building in the same locality but not at a visible distance  I remember that there use to be a yellow curtain on her window then which was always drawn and once I wrote a small haiku like poem about it and sent it to her in jest. I seem to have lost that poem somewhere but I do have another poem which I wrote after I read her poetry collection 'Where I live'. As I wrote earlier in my blog  I am not a poet but poems just come to me and I just note them down. In this case this poem-like review just happened when I finished reading her book and when I wanted to send her my reaction to her book. This poem-like review made my job of describing her book easier and I promptly sent it to her. Arundhathi was fascinated  with this form of expressing my reaction to her poetry and felt that my use of the phrase 'And  silence far away' summarized the underlying  essence of poems in that book.

I am reproducing that piece of "poetry' I sent  her at that time.

Your  Poems Arun

 I can smell

From Where I Live

Shifting meanings

From a word

To image another

Like the breaking of a wave

From this end

To that

Into a crash of crescendo

And

Silence far away.

Vishnu Mathur.

16th May 2005.