One of my very early memories of monsoon travels is one of visiting Puri in Odisha, when I was just about eight or ten. It is memorable because I read the Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel Pather Panchali in its entirety on the train with my fat eyeglasses, while other kids were demanding jhaal-muri and hawai mithai from vendors. Also, because “monsoon” was a new word I had acquired in my English dictionary.
On arrival I made my acquaintance with the famous and popular Puri Hotel, which was full of “summer vacation” tourists, mostly parents around the same age as mine, and their screaming, jumping children, from Assam and West Bengal. The excitement among the juniors pertained to the fact that the huge mass of the Bay of Bengal lay churning before us day and night, easily observed from the hotel balconies. I admit no more reading happened and I gave in to the charm of the volatile sea.
As we explored the town, we met a rickshaw-driver named Jambavan, who offered us a special tour, obviously at a premium over the going rate. This included temples, boutiques and the shops of local craftspeople. I don’t remember Jambavan’s face, but a few other things about him have stayed on. For instance, the fact that at times he sang or even recited poetry out loud while pedalling. He was seemingly a happy man.
I had absolutely no knowledge of Odia at that age, while Jambavan spoke in fluent Bengali and Hindi. But the lines he recited were in Odia. Even as a child I struggled to decipher his words by comparing cognates I knew. A few words yielded their meaning, but some curious turns of phrases didn’t. I don’t remember the exact lines, but there were references to a temple, to sad women, to sea-shells, and to death. The concept of each of these was mysterious and largely unknown to me at that age, but the nuances trickled in.
Many years later, I came across a bunch of poems my classmate in Cotton College, Guwahati, brought me to read one monsoon day. The college library was a refuge as it poured every bit of the sky. He and I were poetry compatriots and often counselled each other in those very early days of our poetry love.
He found my poetry a bit “radical” in its metaphors of the “rising sun”, the “clenched fist”, and the “marching feet”. Langston Hughes, Nazrul Islam and Nazim Hikmet (a slim, translated book) were my influences then. I told him that the sea, rains, sad faces and delicate lights were the features of my poetry, composed both in English and Assamese.
“Then you should read this poet,” he said with the shy pride of having discovered the Kohinoor. “A great poet from Odisha. This is Jayanta Mahapatra. I want to be like him.”
To please my poetry pal, I read a poem which I revisited at the university, only because the title had the word “Puri” in it. My memory of Puri and the sea demanded reminiscing at that time.
Endless crow noises
— “Dawn at Puri”
A skull in the holy sands
tilts its empty country towards hunger.
White-clad widowed women
past the centres of their lives
are waiting to enter the Great Temple
Their austere eyes
stare like those caught in a net
hanging by the dawn's shining strands of faith.
The fail early light catches
ruined, leprous shells leaning against one another,
a mass of crouched faces without names,
and suddenly breaks out of my hide
into the smoky blaze of a sullen solitary pyre
that fills my aging mother:
her last wish to be cremated here
twisting uncertainly like light
on the shifting sands
It’s not unusual to write about a poet whom one has never seen, nor met even briefly, nor heard for a fleeting moment. Tagore has written: “Taare chokhe dekhini taar banshi shunechhi” (Although I haven’t seen her/him, I’ve heard her/his flute.). On reading this poem, I imagined Mahapatra as a poet-resident of the seashore, watching an endless stream of humanity – headed for the temple or elsewhere – bring him this realism of sadness within the larger scheme of human machinations. That was my fledgling knowledge of a poet I had just began discovering as my own writing in English started evolving.
Mahapatra, who is from Cuttack, is said to be one of the poets who laid the foundations of Indian English poetry, a nomenclature we vociferously debate and discuss threadbare today. His style and métier being distinct from the Bombay school of poets, he is described as having a tranquil and metaphysical voice. To me, his tone was like the tireless gulls over the monsoon sky of the Bay of Bengal, a sight we usually ascribe to calm, but a phenomenon that’s largely looked at by the fisherfolk as a sign or omen.
Most poetry aficionados know about Mahapatra’s long teaching career, the number of books he has authored in Odia and in English, and the prestigious prizes he has been awarded both at home and abroad. One such significant recognition was the RaedLeaf Poetry Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry, 2013, given to him in Hyderabad.
My personal regret is that I still haven’t met the poet my college classmate so fondly recommended, and whom the rest of the world celebrates today as one of the grand old men of Indian English poetry. However, reading this poem of his recently while regarding the monsoon clouds over the Deccan plateau brought to my mind what the sea at Puri, the light summer rains, and Jambavan’s plaintive tunes encapsulated for me:
Sometimes a rain comes
— “A Rain of Rites”
slowly across the sky, that turns
upon its grey cloud, breaking away into light
before it reaches its objective.
The rain I have known and traded all this life
is thrown like kelp on the beach.
Like some shape of conscience I cannot look at,
a malignant purpose in a nun's eye.
Who was the last man on earth,
to whom the cold cloud brought the blood to his face?
Numbly I climb to the mountain-tops of ours
where my own soul quivers on the edge of answers.
Which still, stale air sits on an angel's wings?
What holds my rain so it's hard to overcome?
As I dived deeper into Mahapatra’s poetry over the years, my awareness of his work grew manifold. During my Masters at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, a close friend from Cuttack used to regale me with songs in Odia. One of those were: “Jaa re bhaasi bhaasi jaa…”, a popular number. When I praised the lilt and lyrics, he pooh-poohed my taste and told me to read “real lyrics” by his famous hometown poet Jayanta Mahapatra, a master of both poetry and prose in Odia as well as English.
I followed his advice and soon discovered that Mahapatra was a true artist of the world, versatile and many-layered. His tranquil style does not undermine the deep prophetic nature of the terse realism he displays. It’s brutal and haunting, like rain putrefying dead limbs.
At times, as I watch,
— From “Freedom”
it seems as though my country's body
floats down somewhere on the river.
Left alone, I grow into
a half-disembodied bamboo,
its lower part sunk
into itself on the bank.
Here, old widows and dying men
cherish their freedom,
bowing time after time in obstinate prayers.
While children scream
with this desire for freedom
to transform the world
without even laying hands on it.
I must mention that even as a child then, I knew the reference of Jambavan’s name. A great genial bear – in some narrations he is an ape – named Jambavan is featured in The Ramayana. He happens to be an ally of Rama’s. When human endeavours – or Rama’s so-called godly ones – fail, Jambavan steps up to assist him.
He counsels the monkey hero Hanuman and helps him take charge of his own supernatural qualities. Now I won’t call myself Hanuman, and nor am I a devotee of Rama the Aryan god who fights Ravana, who is deemed a demon in the traditional version of the epic. But our rickshaw-driver guide Jambavan made me realise the potential of enjoying sound in poetry other than what was offered by the standard English canon in our schools.
I have never managed to read Mahapatra in Odia, but from reading this eloquent Indian English poet, his sounds and rhythms and rhymes – said to adhere to the unique sensibilities in his mother tongue – jangle in my head like myriad temple bells. At times they howl like the breeze tormenting the choppy waves of the rainy Bay of Bengal.
The faint starlight rolls restlessly on the mat.
— “The Moon Moments”
Those women talking outside have clouds passing across their eyes.
Always there is a moon that is taking me somewhere.
Why does one room invariably lead into other room?
We, opening in time our vague doors,
convinced that our minds lead to something never allowed before,
sit down hurt under the trees, feeding it simply because
it is there, as the wind does, blowing against the tree.
Yet time is not clairvoyant,
and if it has the answer to our lives, proud
in its possession of that potential which can change our natures,
beating the visions of childhood out of us,
the socialism and the love,
until we remain awkwardly swung to the great north of honour.
What humility is that which will not let me reveal the real?
What shameful secret lies hidden in the shadows of my moon?
What Leo Tolstoy called “infectiousness” in art (“If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art”) is what comes to my mind while reading Mahapatra. The metaphors, the deep sway of the stark senses, the elements in their raw yet graceful introduction all combine to for the infectious undulation of Mahapatra’s poetry. In his language night becomes the path to light, rain becomes the harbinger of new life, and faces become tales of unshaken human capabilities.
Reading this very recently, I wondered how it’d be to go back to Puri, the temples, the winding roads by the sea, and a windswept voice like that of Jambavan who, now I know, must have been reciting Jayanta Mahapatra then:
Years later, the evening wind,
— From “Dhauli”
trembling the glazed waters of the River Daya,
keens in the rock edicts the vain word,
like the voiceless cicadas of night.