Painting That Red Circle White
Author: Mihir Vatsa
Publisher: Authorspress, Rs195
This anthology — rich in content and experimental in form — has captured the most regular dynamics of life and adorned them with gripping metaphors and sentiments, writes ANANYA BORGOHAIN
language is a societal artefact, a tool of communication and persuasion, the basis of human survival. Art and literature are then its aggressive assertions, and poetry a tributary element in this intrinsic structure. Indian poetry in English is said to have been pioneered by Henry loius Vivian Derozio, whose legacy was followed by erudites from Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, AK Ramanujan to the post-Independence poets of ‘new India’ who wrote about ‘Indian situations’ such as Nissim Ezekiel, Makarand Paranjape, Tabish Khair. Today, it goes beyond ‘Commonwealth literature’ or being an extension of British linguistic imperialism. It stands on its own grounds and configures its own paradigm. It can be submerged in a Marxist rhetoric or be a reflection of the post-modern mundane. Mihir Vatsa’s anthology of poems titled Painting That Red Circle White rejoices this very art of being many things at the same time. It commemorates the multiplicity of 37 poems within a single unit. These poems, he says, are bound by mutual themes such as memory, imagination, reality (as seen in his poems about families), as well as about places and urban spaces as seen in most of his road-based poems.
Vatsa is the winner of the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry prize last year as well as the winner of the Toto Funds the Arts award for writing this year. At 23, his writings have appeared globally in reputed creative writing forums.
About the reception of poetry by the Indian layman reader, Vatsa says, “Much has happened with poetry since our first introduction to it in school. And this, I think, has resulted in a kind of interest which is rebellious; poetry has taken on different forms, registers, idioms. One ceases to view it only as the left-aligned text with line and stanza breaks; there are other, nuclear definitions too. Then there is free poetry: poems on blogs, the web, literary journals and magazines. I think what has changed is the venue. It has diversified, perhaps with a sense of distinct readership for each, but a readership that knows what it wants, and is critical — not merely of the ‘talent’ but also of what it desires.”
His collection comprises a preface titled ‘English (A Personal Essay)’ where he underlines how learning English and the lack of the same have created a cultural gap between his parents and him. He highlights the psychological alienation and the intellectual fissure that operate in most Indian families therein. Apart from the essay, the anthology has four sections. He explains, “The title of each part comes from one of the poems in it. The first part, ‘In Divisions We Adjust’, is more personal to its narrators; the second part, ‘Till letters Burn Her Face’, has my mother poems and dwells more on observations, and is distanced time-space wise. The third part, ‘In Segments of Time’, is a short collection of my earlier poems. The last part, ‘Of Things Dying in Winter’, is about breakdown of relationships.”
The poems are rich in content and experimental in form. He has efficiently captured the most regular fundamentals of life and adorned them with metaphors and sentiments. They try to locate peace, even if peripherally, on just another balmy day. He seems to highlight the ordinary, the humdrum nothingness by evoking attention towards it like in the poem Outsiders in a Metropolis:
“There was no sleep in their eyes tonight. Some limbs lay tangled with shivering legs, clutching the corner of a filthy blanket — remains of that ageing wool.”
His mother poems are the most emotionally invested ones. Every poem revolves around the poet persona’s mother. The poem My Mother’s Diary, for instance, is sincerely observational and vivid:
“The necessity to identify letters and recognize threats against gullible reams; answers in shadows of kerosene lamps and sulphur from onions washed earlier; my mother’s diary mocks time with a frame.”
likewise, his road poems also reproduce a sense of nostalgia derived from heartfelt surveillance. like he writes in the poem Nainital:
“Having paid for the room and with a thousand in her bag, even the slightest cut on a ten-rupee note is reason enough for my mother to skip her dinner; Travelling isn’t a privilege, but an experience which must continue at all costs. Or none. like this time.”
Vatsa explains, “I do fictionalise to tie up ends, to reveal, or to conceal more, but most experiences remain personal to me, drawn from memory. Therefore the title of the book. It is like rewriting life as an editing project. For example, the second poem in the book, Konar 1995 was inspired by a photograph of my father and me at Konar Dam in Hazaribagh. Ramgarh NH 33 is about the rains that seemed to have vowed not to stop when I visited Hazaribagh in 2011. Nainital, as the title suggests, is based on the trip my mother and I took back in 2006 or 2007.”
The poems also differ in their narrative methods. There are immense experiments conducted in their form and presentation and punctuations are used in eccentric fashions. At times they are filled with metaphors whereas in others they are the simplest prose-poems; there are some occasional monologues as well.
He calls them “instances of code-mixing, alternating registers and dialects and experimenting with the themes”. This anthology is earnestly moving and addresses human concerns. It brings out the jubilance of the routinely facets and paints them with happy colours.