Rains and Rites: Mahapatra

By Bijay Kant Dubey  

A Rain of Rites by Jayanta Mahapatra opening with the first poem named Dawn and continues on with the poems, as thus, Village, Old Places, These Women, A Missing Person, Samsara, Five Indian Songs, A Rain of Rites, A Rain, The Exile, Listening, Summer, Ceremony, Main Temple Street, Puri, The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street, The Sentence, A Twilight Poem, Appearances, Myth, Four Rain Poems, A Dead Boy, Moving, Silence, Dawn at Puri to the poems, Listening to a Prayer, Sunburst, On the Bank of the Ganges, Girl Shopping in a Department Store, A Tree, Indian Summer Poem,

The Ruins, Evening, Idyll, The Bare Arms in Packing Cases, Ikons, I Hear My Fingers Sadly Touching an Ivory Key, Somewhere, My Men, Hunger, An Old Country, The Desert under the Breath, Hands, Of Armour, This Stranger, My Daughter, India, The Landscape of Return, The Face, The Faces, The Tattooed Taste, Now When We Think of Compromise. A poet neither of rains nor of rituals, he is of a guilty consciousness, marking the malignant purpose in the nun’s eye, in the dark room, a woman searching her reflection, this is the samsara, a business of man, gods and priests and the worshippers, at land’s distance, there lies a mouldy village, resting rawly against the hills, the charred ruins of sun, the long-haired priest of Kali, putting the plucked and stolen jasmines of his villa, whose door never closed he as per his father’s instructions, as for to be put into the goddess’ morning eyes.

In the poem, Myth, the poet catches the incantation of the drift of years and the chants, the long years as the incense, man as worshipper coming and going, the same old and brassy bells laden with memories tolled and the scene recurring again with the same meditational sadhu in sadhna telling of the sanctum lying on the fringes of Annapurna and Dhaualgiri or elsewhere pointing to, but the poet dares not enter into the temple as myth keeps changing the track of, shifting from hand to hand, eye to eye, the offered, crushed and dried leaves and flowers smiling at him, maybe it that the bearded and saffron-man may ask f he a Hindoo or not. A poet so imagistic, he just keeps playing with words, frolicking with thoughts, ideas and images, coming as converted imagery, pure and distilled, but unexplainable, just as the scenes and sights continue to be, art-pieces seen on the canvas, how to describe them, how to penetrate into something very artistic?

The phantoms of time talking in whispers in the haunted houses

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grass
Of the forest's ferny floor;
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
"Is there anybody there?" he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:--
"Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word," he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
----Walter de la Mare in the poem, The Listeners

Jayanta Mahapatra as a poet is very much like the Walter de la Mare of The Listeners, Sea Fever of John Masefiled and Look, Stranger of W.H.Auden. The poem, The Listeners evokes the same sense of wonder, suspense and astonishment which Mahapatra seeks to infuse in his poetry. The phantoms of time talking to or unresponsive even after knocked by the unknown horse-rider in the woods or listening to from the haunted house and the horse meanwhile champing grass from the turf add to the suspense and curiosity of ours in Walter de la Mare’s poem The Listeners and similar is the case of Mahapatra when he talks of life and vegetation under the shadowed space, slipping through the doors of dreams.

Mahapatra’s Burden of Waves And Fruit as a collection of poems contains in Rains in Orissa, Another Day in the Rain, Events, Winds of Spring, Summer 1983, Summer Afternoons, A Rain Poem, The Voice, An Evening By The River, Trapped, A Time, At Shivaji’s Fort At Panhalla: Looking Across the Western Ghats, River, Shapes By the Daya, A Startled Sun, Twilight, An October Morning, Ann, 30th January 1982: A Story, This Is The Season of The Old Rain, Harvest, A Letter To Kazuko Shiraishi in Tokyo, Stone, May, Of A Dawn, Love Fragment, Song of The Bones, The Wind, Days, Sunday, A Summer Afternoon, Burden of Waves And Fruit, The Life, Stand By, Memory, Dust, Again The Rain Falls, The Dawn of A New Year, It’s My Room Once Again, The Hour Before Dawn, Waiting, Of This Evening, An afternoon, The Skies of Night, Talking of Death, The Looking Glass, Why I Am Afraid To Die, The Year’s Last Evening.

It is difficult to tell about a book of poems and that too an Indian English poetry text, not easily available in the markets, generally self-published and out of stock, frankly speaking, they often sell not, if acquainted with the writer, you will get a copy and if not, you will not get the text of even R.Parthsarathy’s Rough Passage and Mahapatra’s Relationship so easily, as flimsy in their assessment, even the libraries may not contain in forgotten and lost copies of the missing and unknown writers, even now Kolatkar’s Jejuri is not available. What to say of Nissim’s the first book of poems? I smile on hearing the urban pseudo-research scholars, the bluff master scholar and the bluff master guide, all saying great-great in their slangy expression.

Burden of Waves And Fruit which appears from Three Continents Press, Washington in 1988 is no doubt a good work written in the same style, the same expression which he often clutches with and strides along, the imagistic style, the imagistic portals of his and there is no change in Mahapatra and his visionary glides, dreamy flowing and glides, imagistic delving and dwelling upon and by dipping into the waters of nothingness, a poet of the space, the void and the vacuum all around. The things of the sub-conscious and the unconscious level take hilarity and wave around, a centre full of hibernation, there is nothing as concrete, but wavering in thought and idea, image and reflection, emotion and feeling, a neurotic man’s poetry is it, a half-addict’s smiles lie therein, a patient of insomnia thinking within and smiling within is the case with this writer with the base of physics, physics as his subject and he coming to poetry via physics, not literature.

The negatives of the photos are the things of his and he working in the studio to reflect upon, a play with light and shade, just like silhouettes, an artist pencilling images, the images of life similar the case with this writer of writer of physics, experimenting with the Big Bang theory, thinking about the origin of the universe, the space, the solar and lunar bodies, the limits of the skyline, a poet of nothingness, a poet existential and iconoclastic, making and breaking, joining and splitting.

Jayanta Mahapatra does not remain stuck to one theme, one title, he often goes slipping from his themes. A desperation pervads all trhough.

Why I Am Afraid To Die 
A thin wind.
Sands of the river where water floods and goes.
This rain shaking loose the old spelled earth.

My love for you is a selfish love,
wing of decit. .
Now to defy you with defencelessness
for a while,
dumb when you are so near.

What mystery did the sands conceal?
Walking through empty streets
the wind drops on my shoulder.
Any way across this earth, over the water?
How can one look when there is nothing to see?

Here all around, 
whatever it’s called, sky or wind ---
its beautiful mouth,wide open.
(Burden of Waves And Fruit, Three Continents Press, Connecticut, Washington, 1988, p.58)

Jayanta is a blank and to do blank thinking is the idle job of the poet. To be with him is to dip in nothingness, existentialism and skepticism. Poetry to him is a series of vacant thinkings, with nothing to do, nowhere to go. Optimism not, but pessimism too move side by side in his poetry.

Twilight
An orange flare
lights the pale panes of the hospital
in a final wish of daylight.
It’s not yet dark.

In the children’s ward
under a mothe’r face,
the dead,always so young.
Water startles in the river’s throat.

Its cry:
a plea to share in its curse?

Somewhere, this twilight shall fall
and hide the whiteness of jasmines
about to bloom.

Newly-lit lamps
in the houses across the street
make me look out at the wet August evening
that holds up the vast unknown
in such small delicate hands.
            (Ibid, p. 23)

'Rains In Orissa' is a poem of coastal Orissa and its landscapic scenery. The eco-centric description is picturesque enough. Time, the sense of it is very strong in him and he cannot without relating to it.

Rains In Orissa
The sky’s face expressionless.
An oriole call echoes away in the sullen grayness,
the book of earth throbs with the light of things.

A pond heron floats warily in a rain pool.
Its face a mask, it pauses for another look around.
Grass everywhere is huge and moves forward to kill.

The fallen water stores a strange, cold darkness.
A yearning spreads through the vast blur of air.
Something like moss wells in the day’s green eyes.

How time sticks on to the face of this light.
And a graceless hibiscus is swallowed by its shrub of silence.
And lashes of wind give death back to the wild weeds.

Old fireflies invade.
Our efforts to escape turn to mud.
Then, the fatal touch of inaction like this country’s history (p.7)

A skyful night full of stars and the moon too takes him to vacant and reflective questionings of the self. Jayanta Mahapatra is a poet of some existential delving and he got it not through philosophy or literature, but through his study of physics, a study of light and darkness chapters. The poet may grow over the years, but his style will not change it, as the adage says it, style is man.

The Skies of Night
Sometimes there is this night,
a sudden sound wakening me from my reverie.
It is speaking my name maybe,
proclaiming something before the final hours,
a moonlight which raves as a delirious child
or some stubborn black root
screaming out of a cracked wall of memories.

It is as though something lies ahead of me,
a grave task I have to perform,
that lures my blood to war.
Or does the sharp blade of time I hold
turn in my bewildered hand?
What sound is it, growing from within,
that feels the false quiet of repose?

I know I am powerless to reveal myself.
Nor do I know how to hold my silence.
Perhaps the voice which returns at nightfall
and lies sleepless with me in my bed
knows it is too late to talk of peace.
My cries merely slide down its walls.
The lies give way beneath me. (Ibid, p.55)

A Rain of Rites and Waiting
Listening to a Prayer
“Stone cuts deep
A bell trembles,
touched by the pain
of countless people.

Across the temple square,
the wind
that settles on my shoulders
has nowhere to go:
neither a silence
nor an answer”
-----Jayanta Mahapatra in the poem, ‘Listening to a Prayer’ from A Rain of Rites collection (A Rain of Rites, The Univrsity of Georgia Press, Athens (USA), ibid, p. 29)

India
“In an impressive map of lime-washed childhood
can one straggle out,
shift the brutal bones of its boundaries?

The Siva linga,
the rhythmic susurrus of chants on wrecks of petals,
the cage suspended in every father’s just eyes.

Small patient birds here sing in the drawn-out summer twilight,
then fall silent to the night.
The trembling of dreams is everywhere, like the wind.

When we learned dumbly to grow,
we felt of ourselves abandoned in the wilds, in things not real,
full of the mysterious fog that excites the shadows of the spirit.”
----- Jayanta Mahapatra in the poem, ‘ India’ from A Rain of Rites collection
(Ibid, 50)

A book of poems, as such A Rain of Rites, brought out by the Univ. of Georgia Press, Athens (USA) , in 1976 carries it forward the imagistic portals. It’s difficult to say what he takes up and what he means, as it means not what he says, just goes on viewing, without any comments. You cannot summarize what he has as the meaning is not and the words turning on, without anything to reveal, just the things in a flux. Nothing is concrete, everything in a flux, floating and passing, so much abstract and condensed, with blank thinking and reflection. Dawn is the first poem to begin with, later taking on Village, A Missing Person, The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street, Myth, Dawn at Puri, Hunger. Summer, Silence, Main Temple Street, Puri, Listening to a Prayer, Indian Summer Poem, Samskara, A Rain of Rites, tell of his poetic escapades. So deep in time, consciousness and flux, they take their own recourse as for reflection and shedding of light, so inner and internal. The lonely countryside dotted with the nondescript villages shaded by the bunyan and peepul trees, the mother and the daughter sitting in the mango orchard, the missing person and her image haunting. 

The title poem too likewise where the meaning is not, just the word-plays and fleeting images of the things in a constant flux, always coming, always passing. Most probably rains of the coastal region and the rites performed in the rock-built temples, but the mud-built houses the tales of his. They made the grand temples for faith’s sake and to house in the deities, not for themselves and the masons and architects remaining anonymous. The rock-built temples are splendid and grand, an example of architectural and sculptural excellence, but the beggars still visible at the entrances of the temples. Faith and doubt seem to put him into a conflict, if faith be so strong, why doubt seems to be lurking in, leaving the scope for?

The benefit of doubt befits him and he goes on revelling, dwelling and delving with the light, faith so frail, darkness enveloping and encompassing it all. The cattle coming back at twilight, drinking water from and returning back, the darkness enveloping the countryside just lie with the flickers of the oil lamp burning for sometime.

At The Burning Ground 
“The dead ones draw close, looking over
the edge along the river bank
where a new pyre fames high; the river 
curls sluggishly in thick smoke,
two grey wood pigeons as though half-awake
grope around like new ashramites in Rishikesh.
The spell of vermilion burns the flesh,
fires embroider the banyan bark of the mind.
All dead faces appear the same;
is it their silence which flashes on the water,
stands in triumph to my gesture of defiance?

I gaze long at myself in the river,
unable to make out thoser features
with which I am familiar;
only an unexpected darkness
that lives alone under the stone
is able to carry me home,
as though I had never grown up:
impertinent, wild child,
who would have to be taught his lesson.” (Waiting, ibid, p.33)

A son of the soil, an Oriya by birth and rearing, his mind can go nowhere barring Orissa, the Orissan scenes, sights and landscapes, rivers, hills, sea beaches, forests, lakes, bird sanctuaries, historical sites and scenery. The Morning I, The Morning II, Nightfall, A Country Festival, Taste for Tomorrow, The Earth of July, Bhubaneswar, Way of the River, Song of the Past, The Faith, Thirst, Thought of the Future, Orissa, Song of the River, Konarka, Dhaulagiri, Waiting, A Summer Night, The Temple Road, Puri, Afternoons, Learning to Flow Free in the Chariot Festival at Puri, At the Burning Ground, Dusk, Sun Worshipper Bathing, Sanskrit, Shrines, At a Ritual Worship on a Sunday Afternoon, Servility, Bazaar, 5 P.M., Old Earth, The Indian Way, Rain Sense, On What to Build Then, The Beggar Takes it as Solace, Living, Among the Trees, Fragments, in follow-up to them. A Poem to Mahatma Gandhi, Story at the Start of 1978, Sky, Strike Your Secret Earth, The Stranger, Movements, Walking Home at Night, etc. are the poems of their trend, type and tenor. A poet of poverty and hunger, belief and disbelief, faith and doubt, human lust and greed, twitches of the selfish body, things in a flux and indifferent time, he follows the track of his own.

Between the fear of losing you
and the losing
this body
of your words
opens and shuts doors
into
that time waiting behind

I attempt to fit mine
in words
that never belong to me
like the gentle rain’s quality
to the hard earth’s calling
between those fattened seconds
growing upon my needs
----Jayanta Mahapatra in the poem, Between (Svayamvara & Other Poems, Writers Workshop, ibid, p.22)

The voices 
in the darkness
of the summer night
belonged
to the flowers
falling
over the earth.
I heard them not.
Nor did the night,
voiceless
in winged flight,
suffer
love’s caress.
----Jayanta Mahapatra in the poem, Love’s Caress (Ibid, p. 14)

Whiteness of Bone, which appears in 1992, is a major poetical work of Mahapatra, the poet to be reckoned with, substantial and typical, as his Mahapatran poems are in reality , an exercise in word-play and imagistic turning, vacant thinking and random reflection. One from Viking, Penguin Books India, New Delhi, the work consolidates the poetic base of the poet with a foothold of his own, taking poetry, silence, waiting, time, light, truth and doors. His style is the same what it was, playing hide and seek with lyricism and imagism, light and darkness the matters of his revelation as there is nothing to be thematic, poetry is silhouettes, oil paintings, poetry vacant thinkings. Silent In The Valleys is the first poem to begin with, giving way to the poems, such as All The Poetry There Is, Afternoon, Shadows, Light, House, A Death, In An Orissa Village, The Dispossessed, Bone of Time, Summer Afternoons, The Time Afterward, To A Young Girl. The Hill, In The Darkness of The Night, Doors, Farewell, Dawn, Red Roses For Gandhi, Song of The Homeless Girl, as the poems appear to be thematic outwardly, but are never, never so and one may not write a line about as for to substantiate it. While reading Mahapatra, one needs to keep in mind that The ‘Dawn’ poem of A Rain of Rites is different from the ‘Dawn’ poem of A Whiteness of Bone, there are similarly many poems pertaining to waiting, rains and rites, morning, noontime, evening, nightfall, summer and so on. A poet of relationship, with his relationship with the land of his birth and nativity, he is very, very private and personal in the use of his imagery and reflection, imagistic and linguistical which making him postmodern and postcolonial.

Jayanta Mahapatra’s The False Start, which appeared in 1980 from Clearing House, Bombay, begins with A Day of Rain poem, followed by more, such as Suppose, Today, Absences, The Gift of Night, Poem For Angelia Felston, Another Evening, Last Sadness, The Gradient of Dreams, Through The Stone, Woman In Love, A Sailboat of Occasions,

Bound, The Secret, Slum, Pain, The Rain Falling, After The Rain, Time Drawing In, The Mountain, The Storm, The Rising, The Accusation, A Sense of Adventure, Shadows, A Sense of Obvious, The Moon Moments, Ash, The Day, A Kind of Happiness, The Day After My Friends Became Godly And Great, The Years Down, The House, The Retreat, Tonight I Hear The Water Flowing, The Hour From The Window, Steps In The Dark, the poems one by one to continue with again, The Door, The Abandoned British Cemetery At Balasore, India, The Evening That Is To Come, Measuring Death, A Certain Refrain, the poems figuring in to confirm it that he is absurd, existential, a poet of the void, the shadowy space, who to answer his questions, what is this world, why are we here, what the purpose of living, what does it stay here, who is what, who can but say it?

A poet of Orissa, singing of Orissan landscapes, fields and fallows, the azure of the skies meeting the lands somewhere, coming close to, the sea, the rivers, the hills and the beaches, the tourist spots and centres. A poet of Orissa, its cartography and topography, its demography, he maps the natural wealth and resources of it, demarcating the areas of the coastal state of India. Puri, Cuttack and Bhubaneswar, the hub of his poetry, moving from one temple to another, from the Jagannath Puri temple to the Lingaraja temple to the Konark Sun temple. Existential, nihilistic and reflective, he is a poet of waiting, absurdistic, writing the poetry of the absurd, as nothing is what it seems to be and what it seems to be is nothing and our life a study in useless waiting.

A poet regional, historical and sociological, he is many-faceted, as because his base is not one of literature, but of physics, trying to delving deep into light and darkness, where does it flash upon from , where does it retreat back to?

A poem named ‘Pain’ from The False Start may be chosen as for to dwell upon:

The dark tree that stands
over the fields of my blood
has failed to leaf and bud.

Why must it cut across my blood?
I must try to understand it well.

Pursued over and again
by the sky’s heights,
it holds itself fast to the mist of time,
giving my mind little rest, small shelter.

Where are the inessential leaves
that commanded the heart,
disturbing those clouds which only are
the secrets of the sky?

When will my eye return,
that has been swallowed by the sky?
What ceremony
veils its world? (The False Start, Clearing House, ibid, p.30)

Jayanta Mahapatra's waiting is an absurdist waiting, as the characters keep waiting in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, who is Godot after all, why do the tramps wait for?

Similar is the case with Jayanta Mahapatra's poems dealing with time, wait and futile turn up, an absurdist drawing from existentialism and nihilism as the space full of vacuum, nothing is nowhere and man alone in the cosmos. Jayanta Mahapatra is a poet of waiting, waiting for uselesslessly as all our todays and tomorrows have shown it to be, who waits for what and which is what? Whatever be that, let us begin with Jayanta's Waiting, a collection of poems written against a historical backdrop of penetration. Though the collection appeared from a small press, it begins with The Morning-I, telling of a morning in the stride and clasp of a sweeper girl with human excreta and while on the other, in the second morning poem, a starkly naked Jain monk calmly walks down the road determined. At The Burning Ground, Dusk, Fragments, A Poem For Mahatma Gandhi, Sky, The Stranger, are the poems of a type. But many of it, dealing with Orissa the land of his birth and nativity, more specially Puri and Konark and there is nothing more to find thematically, just personal and private reflections abound, those of the physics class and its theories of light. A Country Festival, Taste For Tomorrow, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, Konark, Dhaulagiri, The Temple Road, Puri, Learning To Flow Free In The Chariot Festival At Puri, are the Orissa-relating poems. Published in 1979, Waiting is one in the same tread of the Mahapatrean poems, a poet of bewitching silence, he just sees life in the intricacies of relationships, conspiring against with the fickle mind always in a flux, the moments as bubbles appearing on and vanishing, nothing as mementoes or memorabilia to tell of, everything but in the dustbin of time to be cleaned again.

Jayanta Mahapatra’s Shadow Space, published for first time in 1997, opens with Living In Orissa poem, followed by Landscape, A Hunt of Grief, 1992, Heroism, Trying To Keep Still, The Shadow of Day, Widow, Saving Ourselves, Illness and others to tell the story of same kind and narration as they mean it not, what he says and what he means. Abstract and reflecting, he is a poet of light and darkness, random descent and random reflection, nothing is what it seems to be and what it seems to be is nothing. There is nothing as that exists and this forms the poetic base of the poet, the vacuum writ large over the space infinite. Bazaar Scene, Possessions, Aftermath, Season, Still Life, June Rain, Village Evening, The Quiet, Greeting, Raining, Cloak of White, Defeat, Shadows, Octave, Walls, Denials, The Fear, Enterprise, Awe, Afterward, Life, Ashes, Late, The Stories In Poetry, telling the tales in their own way, what the poetic tale, what the poetic truth, the poetry of nothingness that he writes, life but an absurd waiting, that he relays to. Abstract thought, blank mood, vacant thinking, pervade the poetic spirit of the poet, the colours of loneliness that he sees and feels, the toy clockwork of poetry, what makes one wait, a brief history of losses never to be written, obscure face, the blue sky hanging above his palms, shadows can never open their mouths are the things of his reckoning. His is a poetry based on suppositions, a lot of proposition, a lot of conjecture is therein and the poet contradicting and contrasting, Comparing and presenting, laughter always on the lookout for grief is similar to Hardy’s happiness is but a bubble in man’s life and Gray’s obscure destiny of village forefathers, childhood sitting in shadow to remember and to see the changed appearances.

Jayanta Mahapatra is a poet of just suppose you and had it been; just think you, had I been not, what would have happened, had you been not, what would it have? Why does the sun shine everyday? Why does it radiate and glow down daily? Where do the retreating rays or beams go to? The things of astrophysics continue to hold its sway over him. Who can say about the sunrise and the sunset as we seek to know about light and shadow?

I am afraid of the loneliness
I would share with you.
Some time
you must tell me,
so that I may know:
have you made me unjust?
As I complete the picture of a man
who calls his dog, pets it,
to make such things of life his own,
I hear again and again
a small explosion.
I try not to think of it at all,
but it keeps sounding
like a blare of my heartless laughter.
----Jayanta Mahapatra in the poem, A Poem To Mahatma Gandhi (Waiting, Samkaleen Prakashan, ibid, p. 55)

World History (Going After Ukraine)

By Bijay Kant Dubey

The pages of world history

Are smeared and smudged with bloodstains
And it is but a study in warfare and invasion,
Bloodshed, violence and annexation
And Ukraine can be no exception to that.

 

They Will Finish It Ukraine

 

 

I am but sure of,
They will not let it live
If this could be the bombardment and hostility towards,
Can they not discern it warmongering tendency?
Can they not think of man and his predicament?

 

I Am Disturbed By The War On Ukraine

 

 

Not feeling so well
By my heart and mind,
I feel it disturbed internally
By the war on Ukraine.

 

Putin

 

Is war on his mind,
Not love in his heart,
Only war, war on the minds-cape?

 

O Divine Providence, Show You Mercy To Ukraine And Save It From Destruction!

 

 

O Divine Providence,
Have mercy, mercy upon,
Upon Ukraine
And save it,
Save it from damage and destruction,
We seek for Your Clemency!

O divine Providence,
Heavenly Power,
Up-above the Skies,
Intervene, intervene You
To save it, save it, Ukraine!

 

I Am Awe-Struck, Aghast To See Ukraine Bleeding

 

I am awe-struck,
Aghast
To see Ukraine bleeding,
Dumb-struck and speechless
To see the gory scenes and sights
Of war, mindless war,
Fighter planes hovering over,
Striking, bombing,
Tanks moving into,
Civilian areas being targeted
And the people running for cover.

 

I Feel It Disturbed To See Ukraine Bleeding

 

I do not feel it well,
I feel it unwell
As for mindless bombardment
Carried out on civilian areas,
As for the offensive,
Loss of lives and casualties,
Fighter planes hovering,
Sirens wailing
And the innocent people suffering.

 

 

Is War On The Mind Of Putin?

 

Is war, only war
On the mind
Of Putin,
Can he not
Without war,
Only war,
War on his mind?

 

What Will You Get In Destroying Ukraine?

 

Why to snatch happiness
From the people
Which used to be a part of the USSR?
If you had not to give freedom,
Why did you?
Let it live,
Exist.

 

I Cannot See Ukraine Bleeding

 

 

My heart aches to see it war-ravished,
Embattled, exhausted and wearied,
Fatigued and waylaid.

 

How Much Aggrieved And Disturbed Am I For The Mindless Bombardment And Shelling On Ukraine!

 

How much aggrieved
And disturbed inwardly,
How much painful is it to feel
For the people suffering,
Children and women in trouble,
Their poor destitute and misery,
Affliction with!

 

 

 

O God, What Am I To See It Here? (For Ukraine)

 

O God,
What am I here
For
To see,
O God,
My God,
For
Mindless bombardment,
Heavy shelling
To see,
Children
And women
In blood,
O God,
If You are anywhere
To see it from!

 

My Heart Aches To See Them Fighting (Ukraine Chapter)

 

On one side Russia, Belarus and pro-Russian soldiers
While on the other Ukraine and its international supporters,
But who is there to extinguish the fire flames, douse it
Rather than fuelling the flames?

 

Om Shantih Shantih Shantih, Who To Chant For The Russo-Ukrainian Ongoing War?

 

Where the sage, great sage to chant
Om shantih shantih shantih,
Shantih shantih shantih
For the factions engaged, engaged in war,
Who, who there to chant the peace mantras
For to keep it unruffled,
Where, where the Buddha delivering his sermons,
Peace sermons,
Where, where that sentinel to come, come to,
Where, where the messenger of peace to negotiate,
Negotiate and talk to all parties?

 

When I See Ukraine Writhing In Pain (2022)

 

Ukraine lies it besieged,
Fallen
And what am I to see it
Barring the rubble, debris
Of the poor destitute,
Hapless people of the war front?

Ukraine has almost turned into a war-field,
Who is it to bail out of crisis
When all are talking war
In this critical time?

 

Just See The Face Of Children, The Face Of Women Before Inflaming War In Ukraine

 

 

You just try to see,
See
The face of children,
The face of women
Before bombarding,
Shelling on Ukraine,
Attacking with launchers and missiles,
The face of children,
The face of women
Before going for the offensive!

 

God Help You, Ukraine!/ Ukraine Is Bleeding

 

Nights full of 

Heavy bombardment, 

Shelling and massive gunfire,

Rocket and missile attacks

With the sirens wailing,

Tanks moving into

And the fighter planes hovering over

And the people running for cover,

An escape from the loss of life and casualties. 

 

War On Ukraine

 

How has war affected

Children,

Women,

How has it hit civilian areas,

Buildings and complexes

Bringing humanity to a standstill?

 

Wailing sirens,

Heavy shelling, massive gunfire,

Mindless bombardment,

Striking fighter planes targeting!

 

But when will it return to normalcy,

When will peace prevail upon,

Will it be negotiated,

When will happiness be on their lips?

 

O God, Save, Save You!

 

O God, save You,

Save You Ukraine

From mindless bombardment,

Shelling,

War on humanity!

 

How To Avert The War!

 

How much grieved am I

To see children, women

In war-ravaged Ukraine,

Oh, anybody could bail of crisis

Befalling it!

 

War Scenes

 

Into a war-field

Has it turned,

Missiles hitting the complexes,

Rocket launchers targeting civilian areas,

Sirens wailing

And the fighter planes hovering over,

Bombardment carried out,

Heavy shattering the dreams,

How horrific, terrific the scenery!

 

City After City

 

City after city lies it shelled,

Devastated and destroyed,

Kharkiv,

Kiev,

Bombardment continuing upon civilian areas

With war crimes committed,

Ukrainian cities turning into ghost cities,

War taking a heavy toll upon,

How to get out of this destruction and bloody 

Nissim Ezekiel: Bijay Kant Dubey

 I took her to a cinema, we saw

The lovers kiss, we saw the jealous man

With subtle comradeship upset their plan

And how their love compelled him to withdraw.

----Nissim Ezekiel in the poem ‘An Affair’ from A Time To Change collection

(Nissim Ezekiel, Collected Poems, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, Third impression, 2007, p. 11)

Between the acts of wedded love

A quieter passion flows,

Which keeps the nuptial pattern firm

As passion comes and goes,

And in the soil of wedded love

Rears a white rose.

----In the poem ‘Marriage Poem’ taken from Sixty Poems collection

(Ibid, p.46)

People have discussed Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004) in their own way, taking his poetry from the first modern poet point of view, making his tryst with destiny in the post-independence period, calling him the beginner of modernism, though there is nothing like that as because K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar himself refers to as one of the new poets and Nissim has been included in ‘The New Poets’ chapter of Indian Writing in English, taking together Shahid Suhrawardy, Manjeri S.Isvaran, P.R.Kaikini, Krishan Shungloo and others even before him. In the beginning, he too like Lal and others used to send poems to C.R.Mandy as for giving a breakthrough in the issues of the Illustarted Weekly of India, which the editor reported to Iyengar by saying that he felt corroded with the bad quality of the verses written by the Indians, but had been still hopeful of getting a talent. Even before Nissim there had been Tagore, Aurobindo and Harindrananth to show the traits of modernism. Apart from them, some were there to make us felt their presence. If we go through the texts of the 1960’s, they will themselves speak of the position. Indian English poetry then had been nowhere. Just the people used to read them in the literary essays section and we used to waver between Indo-Anglian or Indo-Anglican. If we turn over the older syllabuses, we shall come to mark. M.K.Naik’s A History of Indian English Literature itself appeared in 1980 and the first prize ever to an Indian English poet went to Jayanta Mahapatra as for Relationship in 1980. Nissim too had been a writer of some middle order, but evolved in due course of time. It is also true side by side that journalism kept him alive and he felt stimulated from time to time as for being a Bomabayan. Even after the Nobel to Tagore, the men on the syllabus committee for English in different universities wavered in prescribing the poems from Gitanjali to M.A. students, barring sporadic and stray instances. Virtually, from the eighties or the nineties, we have started to keep it going. Something it has been done quite under the advice and suggestion given by the UGC, its peer teams and committees.

Several things have gone into the making of Nissim Ezekiel the poet and his growth and development as a writer of Indian verse. The first is he received his education from a convent school which he speaks of and later on moved to England for a brief stay and returned back to as it happened with R.Parthasarathy. Secondly, he had been a modern man, a Bombayan who grew up in the negation of Aurobindo and his trends. Thirdly, he was a teacher of Bombay University. Fourthly, a freelancer he was and an editor of literary journals. But no other poet is questioned, interrogated so much as he is in his delineation, picturisation and perusal of India, Indian scenes, sites and landscapes. This is as because he fails to understand the myth and psyche of mother India, just views her from a distance, like an alien insider with his outsiderish feeling and emotion. The main thing of being aloof or separated from is his being a Maharashtrian Jew. He has nothing to do with Indian philosohy, spirituality, religion, ethics, morality and metaphysics. The poet as a modern man of the city talks of love marriage, tea parties, honeymoon, love affairs, picnics, outings, valedictions and so on. Outwardly, he appears to be modern, frank and free, but is conservative and orthodox.

There were poets even before Nissim Ezekiel and the tradition has been continuing since, not from him. Think of the time when Ezekiel was not. Just suppose it, feel the vacuum. Many used to write definitely, but dared not publish, as an Indian can be a scholar of English but can never be a Shakespeare, similarly an Englishman can be a scholar of Hindi but can never be a Soor or Tulsi, used to hold true. One should write in one’s own mother tongue? Why to choose the foreign language as the medium of expression? An English woman in a sari used to click before. Even Indian English poetry passed through different tests and ordeals, should it be called Anglo-Indian, Indo-Anglican, Indo-Anglian, Indian poetry in English or Indian English poetry? People debated and discussed over, should the Indians write in English? Finally, the theme of Indianness, a term of some larger connotation came to rescue it. Such a thing was asked in connection with Ezekiel as he had had nothing to do with Indian thought, culture, tradition and philosophy; spirituality, metaphysics and theology. Nissim himself refutes the poetry of Aurobindo and calls himself a convent educated boy writing in English.

On finding none around to publish the books, P.Lal and his friends founded the Writers’ Workshop, Calcutta. Nissim too got the support and benefit from the establishment. A poet of the Bombayan circle of critics, he has definitely got the support of the people otherwise he would not have scaled what we we presume it today. Even in Advanced Literary Essays (Prakash Book Depot, Bareilly, 1961) by Prof.J.N.Mundra and Prof.C.L.Sahni and Quintessence of Literary Essays by W.R.Goodman (Doaba House, New Delhi 1968), we do not find the names of Nissim, Kamala, Jayanta, Ramanujan, Adil and Daruwalla. In Mundra’s book, one can see the names of B.Rajan, Krishan Shungloo, Subho Tagore, Sudhindranath Dutt, V.N.Bhushan, Cyril Modak, Nilima Devi and Adi K. Sett as new poets. In the anthology of poetry, The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry, published from Sahitya Akademi in 1970, Prof. V.K.Gokak presents the poets on a broader scale rather than concentrating on him merely as the harbinger of modernism in Indian English poetry.

Nissim is a poet of the urban space, modern city life and thought-content. A modern hollow man, he can relate to in that way quite easily. Just love and human relationship form the poetic crux of his story. To laugh at, caricature and joke is the job of the poet and he chuckles merely. A faded romantic, he is not so colourful. He has the desire within to fall in love, but draws the steps back too, as societal rigidity and community obligation continue to nourish him otherwise. A Jew he cannot change himself rather than adhering to it, never can imagine of mixing as the ghettos continue to bind him. He beats the band of love-mariage, but consummates it not and he marries as per arranged lines. India too had been in search of modern poets and we got it in their voices. But modernism is not so easy to be delved deep, as because it comes not poetically, but appliances, apparatuses, comforts, experiences, discoveries, inventions, medicines, fashions, designs, spirits and times too have something to say to and to add to. Logic, reason, fact and fiction have dispelled the darkness within. Humanism, liberalism and development too have the stories to tell them. It has definitely taken time in making the people modern one by one.

If one goes through the poems of Nissim Ezekiel, one may come to mark the influences of the English poets which he is so heavily under, as for example the Elizabethan sonneteers and lyric writers, the metaphysicals, the romantics, the Victorians and the moderns may be referred to. Thomas Wyatt, Michael Drayton, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, etc. are some of them whose influences can be definitely felt and marked upon his poetry. The influence of Andrew Marvell, John Milton, George Herbert, John Donne and others can be marked in his psalms. His conversational style has something to owe to T.S.Eliot and Walt Whitman, but his caricature takes to a different plane. The grammar of poesy is certainly not the chief priority of the poet as he intends it not on dabbling in rhetoric and prosody. He just goes on putting them in a free-flowing verse.

In the fifities, he started to publish, but that could not make a way so easily and he took time in growing up, getting famed. As a poet, he went on evolving and substantiating his stance as because had not been so prolific as we think think of now. Ones or twos added to his poetic corpus. He was definitely not a classicist, scholarly in his write-up, but a modern moving along modern life and culture, city living and urbanity, keeping pace with and this added to his corpus, benefited him in a befitting way. Man and his manners, modern life and society, thought and culture had been the topic of his perusal and he perused that too. Irony was his forte; humour the chief property and he continued to regale with these. The India of rural spaces and scapes, the hamlets dark, thinly populated and scattered across a vast stretch of the land, dotting it with their own solitude and away from being human haunt could not draw his pen towards and he felt helpless in taking to. He was blind to the treasure trove of India, its ancient temples and rich legacy of the land, Indian heritage and culture. We often question with regard to him, how far Indian he is and the quest for identity leaves him not behind. He is no doubt a peculiar type of poet, commemorative of private and personal ethics and reflection.

There is nothing as that to look for sublimity in him. The cinema hall, the theatre, the park, the airport, the dockyard, the picnic spot, the restaurant, the salon, the club and the shopping complex, this is the hub of his city-centric poetry. A poet of Bombay, the ever growing city with the pace of time, the metropolitan to the mega city, engages him. He is a poet of birthday gifts, marriage parties, love letters and goodbye parties. Please, thank you, good morning, good evening, good night, kindly, bye-bye, ta-ta, see you again, etc. are the things of his etiquette and mannerism. The poet as an observer likes to visit the art galleries, put on display and there he may view the pregnant woman seeing the nudes and feeling ashamed of; in the cinema hall, he will like to propose before, but faltering to kiss and at the hotel the semi-nude of the Cuban dancer will come to the rescue of his delight. I love you, I like you, these are the terms recurring in variety and the poet seems to be inclined after. Valentine cards and roses, bouquets of flowers, new year greeting cards, wedding bells jingling and he going with the gifts, all these things lie in muted well. The boyfriend, the girlfriend and the love story, a quest after beauty, an inclination for and infatuation with, the revellings into the realms of fancy and imagination add to his poetic dimension. The best of the hotels and the hostels he seeks to derive from and to give to. An art critic, he can apply modern art to poetry writing.

In the poem, A Woman Obseved, which happens to be in The Exact Name, he pictures a pregnant woman viewing the nudes at the art gallery:

I watch her sadly as

she leaves the place, my eyes

embracing all that sensual

movement bursting through the dress.

(Collected Poems, ibid, p.140)

Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd To His Love, Edmund Spenser’s One Day I Wrote Her Name, Sir Philip Sidney’s Loving in Truth, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s And Wilt Thou Leave Me Thus? and Forget Not Yet , Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress, John Donne’s The Sun Rising, etc. seem to take the canvas away from him and he dwells far, into the realms of love and its dreams and promises.

Holding the tongue in cheek, Nissim chuckles, never to let them into guffaws, just keeps beaming with joy, discerning it all, really a critical person. Maybe it that he is not scholastic, pedantic, classical and great from the old and medieval point of view, but is definitely a great poet, a classical romantic he is no doubt, if to review that from a different perspective of delving. The things which are easily accessible in the English poets are predominant in him and he excels in assimilating them. A romantic poet he is, but differently, without a deceptive appearance. Outwardly, he appears to be ludicrous, humorous, ironical and satiric, pontifical and hypocritical, but from the inward within of his, he is but highly philosophical and metaphysical. It is difficult to judge a talent like that of Ezekiel as because sometimes he appears to be too much trite and hackneyed, but is not so at all.

Sometimes the ordariness of expression takes us aback, sometimes the irony of conversational English punctuated by a foreign learner’s desire to learn and practice spoken English, which is but ludicrous English, one committing mistakes to be proficient in. Such a thing Somerset Maugham too speaks about in his prose-piece, Learning to Write. Several stenos and clerks too turn into knowledgeable persons in the long run. Many lawyers too without having a base in English learn to pefect it in the end. Too much erring and instead of it, the forcible continuation too teaches us awkwardly to be dextetous. Nissim should also take a note of it that the geography department teacher’s somehow carried on English is just the one side of the picture while on the other many of our English tachers fail to deliver in English, speak hesitatingly, haltingly, who later on may take over as or turn into university heads and good professors of English, guides and resource persons.

Nissim’s poetry is an exercise in spoken English, one practising, taking the tips to learn it, one following how do the people use and apply it and that too where in India. English is used in getting the cases and complaints lodged; the diaries being entered into at the police station and they writing in their own way, whatever pidgin-English coming into the mind, the policemen entering into, erring to perfect it. The school, the college, the court campus and all other offices are the places where it is applied in. Some trying to be oversmart too like to converse in English. To use a few English words once was a matter of pride. Even the illiterate villagers used to appreciate and talk of. Even the illiterate peons of the convent schools too in the long run develop their common sense as for understanding the speech. Just through the patriot and his usage of English, Nissim is caricaturing the monkeyish disciples of the iconic, father-figure, Mahatma Gandhi. The British prisoners, but our freedom fighters, in their aping of Gandhi and Gandhism, sometimes seem to have befooled. Some of them had not been freedom fighters, but turned they into as for pension. Some of them were very blunt and were lathi-wielding. Had they been not aggressive, the English too would not have left, is also the other side of the truth. Specially, the half-wits, the half-learned fellows are the butts of his humour. While discussing Nissim’s poems centring round the half-learned people’s English, it comes to the fore, the little-read fathers-in-law taking the interview of the simple and rural girls, asking them, what’s your father’s name, the composition of tea-making and others to be responded back in broken English. Sometimes even the street roamers and loafers, who do not like to read and write, but go on roaming, passing time and spending father’s money, too like to perform well, starting their career from the profession of a salesman or a business executive, an agent of a company or a medical representative.

While reading the poem, Marriage, several things come to the mind’s plane, as such, what is love, what is marriage and what the workings of these. Perhaps love does not remain the same love started earlier. Sacred and sacrosanct love, promised with never to part ways, gets care-worn, anxiety-ridden in due course of time and its duration. Situations and circumstances perturb and perplex it. Human lust and greed unquenchable and hankering after more, propelled by ever changing Nature, seem to take to its own recourse. Similar is the case with husband and wife, lover and beloved, bride and bridegroom. In the sensual and sensuous pleasures of man, lie in the stories of man’s temptation and fall from heaven and Cain’s mark. For sometime, one may feel blissful, but the things which go on affecting will continue to work for fissure and fission and this is the way of the world and of man. Man will definitely get lured towards Eve; they will take the forbidden fruit and be expelled from the garden of bliss and paradise. What Nissim here seeks to say is the temptation for gold, wine and beauty. Nissim’s poem Marriage is almost like Joyce’s sketch, Araby. Something of the daydreaming of Lamb’s Dream Children is here. Just like a newly modern boy, as Gandhiji once used to copy the English in dress, manner and etiquette, Nissim too tries to do that. There is a fascination for Christian life and love, their attitude and manner. His phraseology actually moves around love affair, honeymoon, birthday party and a visit to the cinema hall. Once upon a time people used to rush in to the cinema halls and many a love-story used to culminate and coincide with thereon. Many a college girl, in a tabooed society of ours, used to meet under the pretext of exchanging books and notes. Nissim as a poet too is a lover of this type who will like to visit the cinema hall to share the unsaid feelings of the heart. He just keeps dreaming about love-affair, but can never consummate it.

In the poem, The Couple, the lover appears wonderful to the beloved and vice versa which is no doubt a novel expression to take us by storm. Both of them remain glued to each other, which is but magnetic attraction. Nissim as a modern age city boy has the idea of all that it happens in love. The co-educational convent schools are the best place to study and experience it. Apart from it, a Bombayan he has experience of making love in the park and the garden. Valentine’s Day is specific in this regard, but who will be the Valentine of Nissim?

The first stanza from The Couple may be quoted to illustrate the point:

Indolence and arrogance

were rooted in her primal will,

a woman to fear, not to love,

yet he made love to her

(who can say he loved her?)

and damn the consequences.

(Vilas Sarang, Edited by, Indian English Poetry Since 1950: An Anthology, Disha Books, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, Reprinted 2007, p.44)

The last stanza of the poem throws the light on the poem:

To love her was impossible,

to abandon her unthinkable.

He had to make love to her,

a charade of passion and possession

in which some truth was found in her.

(Ibid, p.44)

By calling her wonderful, Nissim just wants to make her puff with pride and to look back in amazement when the bird gets netted or trapped. The poet has overpraised her to win over and this none can do but a modern like Nissim himself. Both of them keep saying to each other, the beloved hearing it and smiling, which God knows it, who is actually wonderful? One can learn the tactics of love-making from him. How clever is he!

Nissim is a master poet of spoken English and its nuances, specially Indian English speech and accent is the thing of his delineation and he seeks to derive from it, taking it to be the matter of poetry. It is a mistake with the Indians that they like to master grammar rather than taking exercises in language. Such a tendency has been continuing from Panini and his texts. A strict grammarian cannot be a good literary man.

In the poem, which he is so acclaimed for, namely Night of The Scorpion, the poet recrerates an Indian scene, where his mother stung by a scorpion lies unconscious and writhing in pain and burning sensation. The poet sees her so helpless before together with the coming and going peasants. The village folks with the lamps burning dimly and their shadows cast before and the steady rains continuing in for sometime more picture the canvas of the poem. The incessant rains perhaps have forced the scorpion to crawl beneath a knapsack and taking a chance bit it. People search for the creature, but they fail to trace. This is as usual which takes place in every village home.

After the bite, the exorcists and herbalists make a way into the scene. With the village folks in the background as the audience, the mother at the centre of all activity, the herbalist applies the herbal paste to chill and comfort the bite. The priestly men try to tame the poison through mantric incantation while his father, a sceptic and a rationalist applies the paraffin oil and gives a lit match stick to it. The flames feed upon for a while. In the midst of all this, one can overhear the people talking of bhoga, we mean suffering. Such a thing it had been in her previous karma and now it has got lessened. Someone ends on a note of benediction that it is a harbinger of the lessening of sin if be any in the next birth. There is an Indian calculation of past karma and dharma in Night of The Scorpion poem and here one can find it how he is at home in the use of indirect Indianness.

Nissim as an observer holds a low profile, he goes on marking all this with his mother at the centre of all that hectic activity and the specialists treating in their own way and the well-wishers and neighbours wishing Godspeed and recovery while the villain at large, we mean the wicked scorpion with the diabolic tail, the catalist of all that absconding, whom the curses even cannot curse. Nissim as a Jewish man marks the Indian scene and happening in the aftermath of a scorpion bite in the poem, Night of The Scorpion.

In the poem, Background, Casually, the poet in a funny way tries to introduce himself, by calling, how ‘A poet-rascal-clown was born’, one of lean and thin structure, he makes a way through the diverse majority communities, his being a mugging Jew, whom the Christians will take otherwise, the Hindus in their own. As a boy, he failed to spin a top, nor could he fly the kites so smoothly. This brings enough joy for him to feel, be it the developed or undeveloped place, he is happy to be where he is now.

One from from Shanwar Teli caste, Saturday oil-presser caste, his experience tells a different tale, how did the hooded bullocks make the rounds as for crushing seeds for bread. Their ancestors took to oil pressing soon after their arrival in India. A rabbi-saint, instead of his wish or trial, he can never be, he is what he ahd to be. Nissim Ezekiel’s Background, Casually is more powerful and beautiful than that of Kamala Das’ An Introduction. To turn and twist and present the things is the job of Nissim and he does it so eloquently. To take the matters lightly and jocularly and to regale and to recreate is his poetic art, craft and technique.

Nissim seems to be serving, offering Indian chutney or European sauce and this can be felt in his poem Goodbye Party For Miss Pushpa T. S., as it is in other poems too. God knows, who is this Pushpa? Is she a sister or a girl of acquaintance in disguise? Nissim all the time keeps us in the dark with regard to identity, letting it go, changing the topic quite often to bemuse us. Here, just using coming, going, eating or sleeping, he recreates the whole scene. Pushpa is going to foreign and he is there to see her off. Pushpa is smiling and smiling to hear the English of Nissim as and when he says it that there is not only external sweetness in her, but some internal sweetness too is therein. We do not know it if the others have found or not, but he is good at pumping and puncturing. He can make one climb the palm tree and drink juice and at the same time has the guts of cutting the tree underneath. The juice-taker will come to feel what lies in the pleasure of taking at the cost of excitement.

To read Nissim Ezekiel is to smile sometimes, burst into a laughter all alone. Peculiar things he says them in a peculiar and humourous way. There is of course something of a commentator or an advertiser or an anchorman in him; an announcer he can recreate us entertainingly. Even if one asks him to pray or keep silence for a few moments by closing the eyes, he cannot keep still rather will make you burst into a laughter through his antics and activities.

The conservative husbands of the purdahwalli wives will themselves will love to read him if they get a chance to go through his verses, as for example, the poem entitled In India, taken from The Exact Name :

The wives of India sit apart.

They do not drink,

they do not talk,

of course, they do not kiss.

The men are quite at home

among the foreign styles

(what fun the flirting is!)

I myself, decorously,

press a thigh or two in sly innocence.

The party is a great success.

( Collected Poems, p.133)

To read Nissim Ezekiel is to come to feel it that he is not a yogi, but a bhogi and whoever claims it to be solely, it is really difficult to be. God knows, who is whose guru? Sometimes even the saints fail to keep themselves in control; we mean the pseudo-sadhus and their leaked in stories of life. In one poem, the poet sees the world full of girls and poetry as the language of lovers and he finding it in his prosaic poetry and the poem is none but The Language of Lovers for our kind pereusal. Under the pretext of putting the words through the mouth of a foolish critic, he clears the things of his heart tactically. The Egoists’ Prayers even twist and turn the dialogues taking place between him and God and it is quite clear that he can never be devout and dutiful as the personal works are too many to devote to and he is definitely not one among the chosen few to be mindful of his duties.