The poetess has used the word ‘bearings’ in different forms to convey its wide variety of meanings – the manner in which one carries oneself; a machine part; the act, power or period of producing fruit or offspring; the yield; something that supports weight; the part of an arch or a beam; the act; the power or period of producing fruit; the direction; awareness of one’s position; relationship or intervention; heralding a change.
Words enter our mind filling us with a delight of that first meeting with a lover lingering – the knowledge that words exist seem to transform the world, at least for a few dizzying moments. The poetess seems taken in by the word ‘virga’, which she says, “reaffirmed my faith in language, in its ability to capture one’s thought so intensely personal that nobody else could mull over it.” According to her, the word seemed to describe much more than a precise geological phenomenon – it held shades of the reaction – indefinable, thought-altering, inevitably ephemeral when faced with a performance, that is, “when the body becomes the sculptor, clay, plinth, model and work. Constantly dissolved and recomposed.”
The poetess tries to capture the kinetic, which is somewhat like “freezing a raindrop in mid-air”, before it changes shape; before it merges with the earth – often futile and at best, partial – the change of location from memory’s degradable case to a more durable, if just as subjective, one.
Under the title ‘Damaged Goods’, the poetess recites:
You didn’t leave much behind when
you slipped
silent through some unseen crevice
in time.
The scent of a name swiftly rent by
tearful
chords (shreds hunger in the air,
just out of reach).
Persistent, impolite questions about the definition of home and identity; the desire to inhabit a space as well as its shadows; the quest for attachment and the parallel one for flight; these seem neither new, nor diasporic prerogatives to the poetess. Home could be a dubious notion even when one has not changed residence once. Sometimes the tendrils of belonging dig deeper when living out of a suitcase; sometimes not.
It is a bundle of good, not so good and pedestrian poems.
-MG
(HarperCollins Publishers, A-53 Sector 57, Noida-201301.)
