About the Book
Book: Midnight Haze, Poems
Author: Kaia Roy
Publisher: Authors Press
Price: Rs 295/-
Poems that capture the emotions, doubts and hopes of a young mind
An engrossing and unusual bildungsroman, Kaia Roy’s book of poems Midnight Haze helps readers to embed themselves in the process of growing up in India today. The author, thirteen years old, demystifies several assumptions that adults hold about young people because they do not understand the rapid unfurling of technology, opportunity, selfhood, doubt and aspirations in the digital world that surrounds us. Kaia Roy’s poetry is an entry pass that opens the panorama to a two-way process of interaction between the new energy and the old habits of thinking.
Coming to particulars, a significant theme is the mirage of ‘perfection’, for she is young and accomplished and the demands of that image by self and society can be highly challenging. The poet senses her own transformations and says in the preface that she has assembled in Midnight Haze a “collage of emotions I have been experiencing growing up and how it has affected me” (9). Introspective, adventurous —and most of all, deeply sensitive, she finds herself “walking on a tightrope” (60) while negotiating the bends on the road. On one hand “Im the kind of girl who dreams of distant shores” (25), she says, on the other hand are roadblocks of dark stretches and surrender to confusing drawbacks. I admired the implications of Kaia’ s phrase “It’s okay for me to fall and raise again” (9) and her candid declaration that one can be “young and deficient” (17). What we as adult readers — teachers, parents, society leaders, would do well to understand is the young persons’ dilemma that they are expected to “Keep chasing perfection like an endless game, Always feeling not enough, despite their acclaim” (17).
Extending this paradox of self-identification, I turn to another theme that the book exposes and that is “social media posts define our worth” as the poet says and uses a marvelous phrase “I’m fragile like a bomb” (53). I will not attempt to explain such a powerful metaphor but the digital pages explode before our imagination and we see glimpses of how masking the truth about one’s identity or creating alternate realities have emerged as common practices. Whether the “reinvented myself” (90) is game-playing or strategising is not the point-but Kaia in one poem touched me with her desire to assert her cultural identity through language:
I am the dhol, The diya, The rangoli, The lehenga (104-5)
There’s yet another theme that exposes misconceptions that adults often hold about the myth of joyful growing up. Kaia is candid about the phantasmagoria, the dark clouds, the shadows that gather around the stumbling consciousness a young adult dealing with friendships, betrayals, jealousies, anger, hurt and doubt. She searches in the blue haze of midnight for a path that may lead her out.” The sinner’s soliloquy” (46), and “things she does at midnight” are poems that boldly deal with violence, and the recurring image of the mirror in Kaia Roy’s poetry is a reminder of her multiple selves.
In a sophisticated turn, the poet resorts to indirect storytelling as the precinct on which young lives are posted. “The princess in the tower”, the one “who was lost to the night”, is a fable that concludes with the wise couplet “In her silence, there’s a lesson profound, / the loudest of all in the quietest may be found” (52). Similarly, the familiar ditty “Mirror, mirror on the wall” garners a philosophic query: “Am I always going to be the girl I used to be? Or is there a new reflection of me, waiting to be free?” (27)
The young adult is the creator of our contemporary realities and is also created by an inherited cultural heritage. Kaia Roy’s Midnight Haze unravels this territory with confidence and verve.
She is a writer and academic with twenty-four books to her credit and retired as a Professor from the English Department at the University of Delhi. She currently serves as the Convener of the English Advisory Board at the Sahitya Akadem
