BY: Bijay Kant Dubey
I
This is about the green miraculous trees,
And old clocks on stone towers,
And playgrounds full of light
And dark blue uniforms.
At eight I'm a Boy Scout and make a tent
By stretching a bedsheet over parallel bars
And a fire by burning rose bushes,
I know half a dozen knots and drink
Tea from enamel mugs.
I wear khaki drill shorts, note down
The number-plates of cars,
Make a perfect about-turn for the first time.
In September I collect my cousins' books
And find out the dates of the six Mughals
To secretly write the history of India.
I see Napoleon crossing the Alps
On a white horse.
II
My first watch is a fat and silver Omega
Grandfather won in a race fifty-nine years ago;
It never works and I've to
Push its hands every few minutes
To get a clearer picture of time.
Somewhere I've kept my autograph book,
The tincture of iodine in homeopathy bottles,
Bright postcards he sent from
Bad Ems, Germany.
At seven-thirty we are sent home
From the Cosmopolitan Club,
My father says, ‘No-bid,'
My mother forgets her hand
In a deck of cards.
I sit reading on the railing till midnight,
Above a worn sign
That advertises a dentist.
III
I go to sleep after I hear him
Snore like the school bell:
I'm standing alone in a back alley
And a face I can never recollect is removing
The hubcaps from our dull brown Ford.
The first words I mumble are the names of roads,
Thornhill, Hastings, Lytton;
We live in a small cottage,
I grow up on a guava tree
Wondering where the servants vanish
After dinner, at the magic of the bearded tailor
Who can change the shape of my ancestors.
I bend down from the swaying bridge
And pick up the river
Which once tried to hide me:
The dance of torn skin
Is for much later.
Arvind
Krishna Mehrotra is first and foremost a surrealist who has learnt his art of
poesy from surrealism and has tried to lend a hand to it by dabbling in the
verses which seem to be cramming with images, pictures, views and memories
inter-crossing each other, so full of observation and personal reflection. While
going to the bazaar or reading in the library or in the park, he comes across
the different sections of people exchanging their thoughts and ideas, this or
that and as thus he gets the materials for his poesy. To him, it does not
matter what it is important or unimportant. He is a poet of gossips, chit-chats,
tidbits; of time-spirit and is maniac and moody too. The unconscious mind, the
litter and play of thought and the juxtaposition, this is the format on which
he writes, sometimes rational, sometimes irrationally, which is what, we cannot
say it. As a poet he is but a tagger tagging the loose things in his language
the experiences of life as seen, come to feel and marked closely. A post-modernist,
he is a poet of the disjoint self of man; of disintegration and dismemberment.
Just as welder he keeps heating and welding the metal scraps of wayward, trite,
common thing poetry. To go down the memory lines and to collect is the poetic
habit of his as he can often be seen loitering on the balcony, terraces, the
courtyard and into the garden stroking his white beards and talking with the
green trees. His love of white beards is excellent. In the younger days he had
blackly lovelier beards. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is but a poet of Lahore,
Dehradun and Allahabad. The parallel lines running on the conscious and the
unconscious levels he improvises them for his poetry.
What
does he want to continue with here in this poem? But apart from giving a
well-defined start, he starts it abruptly. This is about the green miraculous
trees and old clocks on stone towers, the playgrounds full of light and blue
uniforms. He remembers what has he as Scout Boy. He marks Napoleon crossing the
Alps on a white horse. Here the lines are very striking as this one has to
learn from history, from world history. Many fail to remember the dates and
many go with learning by rote or some by hook or crook. To remember the names of
the Mogul kings too is not easy as one often forgets them; the names are
difficult to remember. Sometimes one does it when forgotten taking the tips
from others. Such a thing it happens in the examination hall. What to say about
the small children? Even the elderly fellows confuse them in taking the names
of the Mogul kings chronologically. One who is parrot-like in imitation may be
do it, we mean the learners by rote.
The
second stanza is all about the wrist watches given, used and re-used, how we
used to maneuvered to make it run, adjusting with, running abnormally,
sometimes faster, sometimes slower. After that, he takes time in saying about
the Omega Swiss watch running into trouble as for some mechanical and technical
fault and he trying to adjust by hand. But what to do with the failed watches? The
memories of the grandfather and his father hang over. Which home is he
describing the Lahore home? The Dehradun home? Or the Allahabad home? Perhaps
the second or the third is. But he is so much connected to Allahabad. There is
something of family history, genealogy and his personal life in this poem. He
sits on the railing till midnight above a worn sign telling of a dentist.
The
third stanza tells of how he goes to sleep after his father has slept and
started snoring. But before he sleeps he keeps standing in the dark alley and
ruminating. There lies the dull brown Ford and the names of the roads come on
the lips naturally,Thornhill, Hastings and Lytton as they live in a cottage. He
grows on a guava tree as a line is suggestive of his plucking of the guavas
frequently or may be it the tree is close to the building. But where do the
servants vanish after the dinner is a thing of reckoning.
Mehrotra
starts the poem with the green trees, old clocks on stone towers, playgrounds
full of light and the blue uniforms doing the rounds:
This is about the green miraculous
trees,
And old clocks on stone towers,
And playgrounds full of light
And dark blue uniforms.
His life as a scout boy finding
craze in traffic control and others he takes a note of all that:
At eight I'm a Boy Scout and make a tent
By stretching a bedsheet over parallel bars
And a fire by burning rose bushes,
I know half a dozen knots and drink
Tea from enamel mugs.
People often mark it how the Scout
boys and girls ask about to walk on the pathways and take to directions:
I wear khaki drill shorts, note down
The number-plates of cars,
Make a perfect about-turn for the first time.
But the routing changes it during
the exam-time:
In September I collect my cousins'
books
And find out the dates of the six Mughals
To secretly write the history of India.
I see Napoleon crossing the Alps
On a white horse.
At that time the watches used to
mean so much for style and time-keeping and so is here the description about
the Swiss watch here taking to the memory of his grandfather:
My first watch is a fat and silver
Omega
Grandfather won in a race fifty-nine years ago;
It never works and I've to
Push its hands every few minutes
To get a clearer picture of time.
Again, he thinks of the autograph
book and thinks of relocating it together with the homeopathy bottles. Bright
postcards sent from Bad Ems, Germany engage the mindscape.
Somewhere I've kept my autograph
book,
The tincture of iodine in homeopathy bottles,
Bright postcards he sent from
Bad Ems, Germany.
Again they return from the
Cosmopolitan Club:
At seven-thirty we are sent home
From the Cosmopolitan Club,
My father says, ‘No-bid,'
My mother forgets her hand
In a deck of cards.
I sit reading on the railing till midnight,
Above a worn sign
That advertises a dentist.
The references to the dull brown
Ford and the roads of Allahabad tell of his dormant passion and possession and
the outing into those:
And a face I can never recollect is
removing
The hubcaps from our dull brown Ford.
The first words I mumble are the names of roads,
Thornhill, Hastings, Lytton;
How the place where he lives, the
cottage and the guava tree:
We live in a small cottage,
I grow up on a guava tree
Wondering where the servants vanish
After dinner, at the magic of the bearded tailor
Who can change the shape of my ancestors.
Here there is something difficult to
explain so mythical, mystical and symbolical:
I bend down from the swaying bridge
And pick up the river
Which once tried to hide me:
The dance of torn skin
Is for much later.
With the flow of time and memory
where does he want to go? The river consciousness it is there in him. The
passage of time he seems to charter it, as seen, experienced and understood in
life. This is as thus time passes off, memory slips down the lanes. This is as
thus life continues it. One is connected with the other, one idea with another
idea, one thought with another, one experience with another experience.