“Give me your darkness and I’ll give you mine and like this, we’ll create light.” Karuna Ezara Parikh begins her book of poems — Where Stories Gather — with this invitation. A hundred-something pages later and past the ruminations on love, hurt, pride, politics, parody, fear and fetish, you’re likely to leave her poems feeling like you’ve made something for yourself there. Perhaps a sense of wonder, a longing for what’s lost, a reckoning, a means to reminisce or — from the depths of something dark — a kindness. Perhaps, that’s the light she bequeaths unto you.
If that sounds like quite the journey, the making of the book wasn’t without one. And before she lets you dive into the results of solitary works and serendipitous oeuvre, she lets you in on the secret — on the struggles of bringing a poetry collection to light. But somewhere along the way, she hits upon a source of comfort that turns into a call of action. “Eventually there came the realisation, that it is only the writing of it that matters. The rest, all of it, is simply grace granted.”
And so, a year after The Heart Asks Pleasure First offered its brand of magic, comes her collection of poetry old and new. Within these pages, Karuna manages to merge the personal and political in ways that will leave you reeling; or better still, inspired. Ask her how she manages to bring that balance to her work and she admits, “It isn’t by design but from a terrible inability to divide the two things within myself. It makes for much misery sometimes, but I hope my poetry is more honest for it. It certainly costs me a lot to function from a place of empathy constantly…”
You get a sense of that empathy – the form it takes – in her poems. Write About What Hurts – one that offers all her brilliance in the single thought of ‘...in victory we all want to belong’ is as personal as it gets till you realise that it was a response to the Indian government’s plan for the Central Vista project. Hearing Jan Gan Man Precisely Mid-August might offer a commentary on our very current, very disturbing state of affairs, but it comes from a place of first-hand remembrance.
Coincidentally, they feature among her favourites. “I think the poems I’m proudest of in the book are poems like Write About What Hurts and Growing Up On A Farm Called Stonehenge - I think because I’ve been scared to put these pieces out, and by finally doing so I feel like I’ve won a battle within myself,” she shares.
That’s not to say her poetry is not with its tenderly light side. A letter for a friend in pain (A Personal Manual to Make A Heart Stop Hurting), a visit to the beauty salon (Your face back thighs arms ass breasts are too tan but how? My desi chest has never even once met the sun!), a frustrated pondering on the insistence of origin (Here), of fellow women (Let us talk more now of women with unafraid mouths) and lovers of all kinds (Show me the hardest ways of you and I will be soft with it. Then show me where you are softest… and I will be softer still) find their own space amidst pain and politics.
Even as one flows seamlessly into another, there was plenty of thought and strife in the process, she says. “I checked if the words (of the old poems) still resonated with me. Apart from the Paris poem, very few have made it to the book unchanged. The new ones are rawer, more honest. They’re definitely longer because with the freedom of the printed page as opposed to the Instagram square, I went wild, I could express so wholly. Many poems that I felt were too vulnerable for a social media audience have finally found their way from the notebook to the page,” she elaborates.
What caught my attention was the Monsoon series. Heavily borrowing from Dostoevsky out of turn, how can you be Indian and not have monsoon sentiments? She ties them all together in five bursts of language and love. I am thirsting but first there are spotted doves growling in the window box expertly mimicking thunder breath above the dousing of gulmohar fire.
“I have a soft spot for that series myself. While I’ve always loved the changing of seasons and find those slivers of time very creatively productive, moving to Calcutta brought the monsoon into focus. It drew different things from me over its long, gloomy days sometimes sadness, sometimes a deep lust for a flooded, quiet life,” she shares. And there’s something in it for you too, you find.
And it holds good for the rest of the book, each page offering every reader their own brand of shared solitude. You’re not the same as when you started the book. And neither is she, it seems. The question she begins the book with — Where poems fall? — no longer holds true. “I think the question in my mind finally changed. Instead of ‘Where do my poems fall’, I’ve begun asking ‘From where do my poems emanate?’ I am interested in the source, in identifying what moves or troubles me, and spending more time with those things... really sitting with that thing that urges poetry, so that I can make more of it. I now realise, where they fall, that’s none of my business, and not mine to decide,” she concludes.
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Pages: 122
Price: Rs 399