‘A complete poem remains forever unfinished’

For poet and academician Ajanta Paul, salt water and the soul’s cry are not distant poles of existence, but intertwined currents of life. Her “littoral lyrics and litanies” evolve organically into the Beached Driftwood Poems, where we find ourselves affirming her prefatory insight: “They [the poems] carry with them the scent of lost landscapes and strange skies, the ebb and flow of thought and life, and the unheard colloquy of insects nestling in their depths.” Just as salt water preserves and transforms driftwood, so too can tears cleanse and heal the soul. In Paul’s vision, the sea and the spirit share a curative rhythm, each echoing the other’s tides. Thus, her everlasting journeys, borne aloft “on the wings of rhetoric,” draw her back to the melancholic earth, even as she drifts in the exotic haze of memory:

I tasted the sounds

Advertisement

of symphonic compounds

explored the edges

of voices and clauses

roamed its reaches exotic

on the wings of rhetoric,

and curled up and slept

while the earth wept. (45)

Memory, for Ajanta, resists confinement within the neat binaries of the reflective or the introspective. In this context, one recalls Vinayak Krishna Gokak’s attempt to canonise a stereotype in his introduction to The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry: “If the poet reflects on the world around him and registers his reactions to it in a wistful or thoughtful manner, he writes reflective poetry. If his face is turned towards the internal world of memories and dreams and he is weighing the significance or insignificance of his own life, he writes introspective poetry.” While we may gloss over the masculine pronoun in Gokak’s formulation, the rigidity of his bi-generic categorisation remains troubling. The “she” of Beached Driftwood, however, not only disregards this limiting stereotyping, but also interrogates the very rationale of such bifurcation. Ajanta’s engagement with memory achieves an iconoclastic scale, inaugurating what may well be hailed as a new genre in Indian English poetry—memory-poetry. Through a dazzling array of metaphors and modes, she stages life’s manifold encounters with memory and its reciprocal shaping of experience. At times, memory appears as “mothballed,” at others “mangled”; sometimes it unfolds as “creases of coordinates,” “kites that don’t fly,” or “yeast in dough.” Elsewhere, it is mapped in the cartographic distance between “lips and eyes,” or tenderly sheltered “beneath my grandmother’s hands.”

Has anyone ever encountered memory taking on a sinewy form, a fleshy quality, or a muscular integrity? In Indian English poetry, perhaps not—at least until now. In the poem “Felled”, the sudden collapse of the protagonist by the wayside is more than a literal slip followed by an inevitable thud; it is, borrowing the poet’s words, “a coming apart”—a disintegration of thoughts and words. Creative minds often endure the rigours of oblivion, haunted by “a curtain of blankness,” yet the searing pain that follows such a slump paradoxically becomes a mnemonic, a vital reminder. Only the truly creative minds know the excruciating pain through which memories are transmuted into artefacts. Rabindranath Tagore’s song celebrates this process as a heavenly act of edification, an amelioration achieved through great bouts of suffering: “Jokhon tumi bandhchile tar se je bishom byatha” (Gitabitan 93) — “The pain was beyond all measure when you were fine-tuning the instrument!” Yet creativity often confronts the rigours of oblivion, a haunting “curtain of blankness” that threatens to erase. Paradoxically, the searing pain that follows such slumps becomes a vital mnemonic, rekindling memory. In its strange, convalescent way, memory—seemingly amorphous and elusive—strives to embody reality: “A sudden rush of darkness/ invades my eyes,/ in an orthopaedic oblivion,/ as a curtain of blankness/ overtakes the vision,/ and I drop down by the wayside/ nursing the twisted tendon of memory” (36).

This embodied dimension of memory resonates with Professor Thomas S. Eberle’s phenomenological analysis in “Organizational Memories” (Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies 186), where he distinguishes between two forms: (a) disembodied yet manifested memory, and (b) embodied yet unnoticed memory. His account, curiously, also revolves around a patient who, after a cerebral haemorrhage and sudden fall, could not remember how to rise again. Eberle details the painstaking process of rebuilding both forms of memory—cognitive remembering (linked to biography) and embodied remembering (linked to action). Both these dimensions find poetic articulation in “Present Perfect”, where the coordinates of Atlas are juxtaposed with human affection, correspondence, and memory: “Where am I on affections’ atlas? / What says, the heart’s compass.” Measured against such benchmarks—“affections’ atlas” and “heart’s compass”—the wounds of memory resist purely logocentric description. Language, after all, is but a fragile scaffolding, incapable of bearing the sinewy weight of memory: “Gnarled roots of silence/ probed the dark earth of distrust/ overturning edifices of language/ onto the dust. / And peace lay like heaps of broken china / on the carriageway of time/ under the wheels of fate/ rolling over the same” (94). To do justice to the proposition that not all memories can be contained within words, phrases, or sentences, it is fitting to recall the “down-rippled-the-brown-cascade” lines from Ajanta’s story “Shifting”. For Mallika, the protagonist, memory was intrinsically peripatetic—restless, wandering, and incurably elusive: “She had always felt there is something essentially nude and vulnerable about these household transfers, during which the articles of one’s daily use, inscribed with the pains, pathos and passions of a lifetime, each bearing its little legend, each a testimony to the gradual, incremental growth of the collective life of a family were reduced to a heap of tangled shapes, as it were. It seemed to her so many histories were dusted out with the clearing of the lofts, and narratives nipped in the bud with the reduction of a household into its constituent parts” (The Elixir Maker and Other Stories 131).

Ajanta demonstrates a rare poetic mastery in her uncompromising ability to call the spade a spade—a craft I would describe as a perpendicular directness. Eschewing euphemism, she asserts with striking clarity that “a complete poem remains forever unfinished” (87). This steadfast vision has been germinating in her sensibilities since the publication of her inimitable Earth Elegies, where the poem “True Light” resounds not with a whimper but with a resonant bang: “We knew these things, who doesn’t,/ but not as in, really know,/ inevitably dismissing them/ as the carnival’s collateral,/ the casualties of callousness,/ of festivities without ties” (77). Here, her voice refuses dismissal or dilution, insisting instead on confronting the stark truths that lie beneath the veneer of celebration. This is precisely why Ajanta can so unselfconsciously confide in her readers: “One must wear this legacy humbly,/ not making a travesty of trust” (84). As Malashri Lal observes in the foreword, “Ajanta Paul wears her learning lightly and infuses her poems with literary echoes and civilizational history without over-burdening the utterances” (12). Together, these reflections highlight Paul’s ability to balance erudition with accessibility, allowing her poetry to resonate deeply without sacrificing subtlety or grace.

The writer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Women’s Christian College, Kolkata.

Spotlight

Beached Driftwood Poems

Ajanta Paul

Hawakal Publishers, 2023

Price: RS 450, 139 Pages