It is important to note that Neerada is as much a Nature poet as she is a people’s poet, says SWATI PAL
Book Name: Alignment
Author: Neerada Suresh
Publisher: DC Books
Price: Rs 199
How many of us have had to be admonished for things not being aligned? The books in our book case in the days when books were bought and read? The clothes in our cupboard? The shoes in the closet? How many of us were ticked off at school perhaps for the tie being askew or the pair of socks not climbing up at the same place on each leg? Or the writing in our notebooks being asymmetrical? For the better part of my childhood and those of my friends, there was a constant, relentless push and shove towards alignment and well, we certainly rebelled at it as young people! A part of me still does and thus when I chance upon a poppy flower for example, in a neat bed of chrysanthemums in the college gardens, I cannot deny that my heart lights up with joy at this break in the order of things!
So when I was invited to read and speak on this utterly delightful collection of poems called ‘Alignment’ by Neerada Suresh, I cannot deny that my interest was instantly piqued by the title and I immediately read the title poem. Rohan Kaul’s home and his partner, Promilla simply came alive by the word picture painted by Neerada Suresh in her rib tickling comparisons between the state of the house in the absence and presence of Rohan. There is a certain glee in the air when Rohan is away as things lie unaligned and unfettered; the same things, to quote,
But when Rohan Kaul is in,
Newspapers stand stacked,
Compressed, breathing in.
Shoes align themselves
Awed, open mouthed.
Paintings, curtains, Cushions, sofas
All tell a tamed tale.
The fact is that while alignment is not only, politically speaking an important credo that nations strive for and while it may have its merits, alignment can often come at great cost. It may be the cost of freedom, it may be about being ‘tamed’ as Neerada put it; it may leave us in gaping fear and thus ‘open mouthed’. The hope perhaps lies in Promilla who, as the poem ends with
defies
A certain kind of alignment.
Don’t let the light and bubbling language deceive you, this poem has far greater implications if we read it closely and it is this deceptive mirth that the poem has which makes the poem, like many others by her, such a joy to read.
Neerada is a grounded soul. Her poems reflect that and she makes poetry out of the ordinary quirky eccentricities and foibles that fill all of our lives. A poem that really clicked with me is Of Lists. It has that elegant humour that seems to be a characteristic trait of Neerada’s, the wonderful ability to laugh at one’s self. It begins with the declaration
I am one
For lists.
And then, with great good humour she narrates how fishing out her list from her bag full of things makes the list redundant as she involuntarily lists from memory and then she swears,
Under my breath
Now to list down
A set of instructions
How not to forget
Getting across
The list you make.
I cannot recall the uncountable times that I have had to strip my entire bag to find a list and then found it much later. It is such a relatable experience and that is what endears the reader to Neerada’s poetry, the sheer relatability of the experiences.
Life and the times as we live them are the focus of Neerada’s poetry. We talk for example about how communication between people now is held ransom by the cell phone. Neerada converts our trite conversations into a poem which she entitles, The New Normal.
New normal is
Sitting side by side
On a sofa
With no eye contact
Chatting of this and that
These are the first few lines and the poem ends with the sad fact that the new normal is:
And at all times
Not facing each other
But thumb twitching
On the mobile through
Inane vicarious clips
Of far and near ones
And total strangers
Never once glancing
Directly or even sideways
Smiling at each other.
Modes of communication or rather the language of communication comes up again in another poem called Version 3.0 where the poet talks about her journey from the deep south up north ‘travelling light with nothing/more than a bilingual tongue’. Subtlely yet strongly commenting upon the Rashtrabhasha issue, she says,
At the workplace, monolingual, mute
Biding time mastering a language
National though notional,
Opening floodgates of ecstasy mouthing
My own tongue, my mother tongue,
At regional gatherings.
This is such striking comment upon the way in which so much in our relationships with people , so much of our identity, so many of our needs, are determined by the fluency with which we speak different languages. But are we accepted because we speak the required language or do we remain strangers divided by our regional differences, not explicitly stated but always there? Do we, in turn, become one with the region of our profession or adoption or do we still dream of lands we associate most with the tongue that comes easiest and naturally to us, our mother tongue? These are questions to think about. Neerada makes you think.
She makes you laugh and cry as well, sometimes together. One such poem is When my brother fell sick in which the poet describes her brother who was bedridden after a botched up eye surgery. She writes about his courage,
He still smiles as always.
Not once did he
Lament this plight, foul mouth
The surgeon or contemplate
Suing. Resigned at once
To a possible, partial vision
In his bad eye, pacified
His wife, my raging sisier in law.
His expressive eyes
Now inscrutable
Behind the dark glasses.
But his smile had the same texture and tinge
Of the smile he sported
When Mother died
And he lingered by her one last time.
The poem is such a beautiful reminder that warriors are not found only on the battlefield; there are many who soldier on heroically confronted by the vicissitudes of life. The brother you read about will surely capture your heart and become your hero.
One of the characteristics of Neerada’s poems in ‘Alignment’ is that there is a lot said through implication which is sometimes sensuous and can get your heart beating a bit faster. For example, in the poem Delete, the poet writes about
Your unsolicited
Picture on FB
And she goes on to say,
The familiar contours
Of your face
Traced out a trillion times
Through summer and winter
Stood out embossed
On my finger tips.
The best option now
For the photo shopped version,
Press delete
To wipe out that sting
Of dormant memories
Off my fingertips.
This is a brilliant use of synesthetic imagery and one can literally feel the tingling in the tips of one’s fingers.
A poem that ends with a delightful twist is Chrysnathemums where the unnamed ‘he’ always came when the chrysanthemums bloomed and he always asked if they were dahlias or marigolds, and the poet says
Too polite to correct
She’d smile- a wide smile
Her lashes lowered and
The chyrsanthemums paled
Into insignificance.
The evening
Stretched to its elastic limits
Catapulted into night.
What she didn’t know was
That he had always known
They were chrysanthemums.
There is the sweetness of romance in these lines that is unmistakable and so appealing ; one can almost imagine the whole scene played out in one’s head.
Tea 1 carries the same fragrance of romance very delicately framed, implied through such lines as
While I made tea
On a rusty stove
He stood watching
Leaning by the door
Aand then said,
I like the cut of your dress
As though it were a cue
To turn the stive on to sim
And let the simmering within
Come to a boil.
Coming back to the pictorial quality of the poems, a reason why many of the poems in fact can be almost dramatically played out in the imagination is the kind of detailing that Neerada works into her poems. Take the poem Of Haystacks. This entire poem is literally painted with an eye for the minutest of details and it reads
The cotton tree stood
In its slender trunk
With its bursting pods
Of parachuting blobs
As the turbaned, earth hued
Cart man, cushioned
On bales and bales
Of golden yellow straw
Came swaying, swinging
Whistling to the orchestra of
The hoof clicking clap dance
Of the ambling bullocks.
Colour, sound, movement all seemed fused almost like a motion picture being played out on the printed page. And of course the symbolism, the personification is discernible, as is the use of alliteration in the swaying swinging, cart cushioned, clicking clap. This lends a wonderful rhythmic motion to the scene and has been really cleverly used.
Again, in The Breadfruit Tree, the poet describes the tree,
We didn’t make much
Of the breadfruit tree
That stood sentry like
By the boundary wall
Spilling its bickering spread
Over the neighbour’s roof
Dropping yellow leaves
Plopping crow eaten messy fruits
Like I said, the tree, pretty much like the haystacks in the previous poem, comes to life in the mind’s eye.
If brevity is the soul of wit, Neerada really aces it in her short poems, two of which are Absence and Sorrows.
Absence,
Distance
Were surefire
Terminators
Of whatever was
Between us
I thought,
But they
Like rings in trees
Add girth, depth
Linking the past
With the present,
Casting shadows
Of decay
Into the future
Direct and simple, the simile is so apt and new- the rings on the trees and the passage of time . It’s important to note that Neerada is as much a Nature poet as she is a people’s poet. In Sorrows she says,
Sorrows
Like a newborn
Arranged itself
In my arms
Purring in content
As if to say
Never let me go
For the reward
Of great truths
To be reaped
And revealed
In the future.
Those who carry their sorrows with them will feel that the poem is made for them. But that’s the magic of Neerada’s pen, she will make her readers feel that the people, places, thoughts and experiences are theirs that she writes about.
Read her, you will feel at home.
— Swati Pal, Professor and Principal, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi, has been a Charles Wallace; John McGrath Theatre Studies and Fulbright Nehru fellowship, scholar. She has published on theatre, creative and academic writing, education and translates from Hindi to English. In Absentia is a collection of her poems
