Love on Delhi streets
Cities and poetry have always been kindred souls: Sophocles’s Oedipus springs from Thebes, Homer’s Achaeans stare for a decade at the forbidding walls of Troy before penetrating them with their deceitful horse, Virgil’s Aeneas wanders around and fights wars before winning Rome and, in turn, inspires Joyce’s Dubliners. Baudelaire’s flâneur finds 19th century Paris a fit subject for verse, and New Orleans and London, respectively, lend their landscapes to the imagination of T S Eliot’s narrators in “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land”. Delhi, too, has long been a muse for poets: Amir Khusrau, Mir Taqi Mir, Ghalib, Zauq, to name a few.
Now, a new generation of poets in the national capital are discovering the sprawling metropolis as a muse and Michael Creighton is perhaps the best among them. His debut anthology, New Delhi Love Songs, was published by Speaking Tiger a few weeks back. Between the beautifully designed hard covers, the book has 76 skilfully-crafted lyric poems. The final 26 are about Garhwal; the remaining about Delhi. The cartography he performs reveals to us not the historical, a more romantic city of ruins and monuments, but the quotidian, contemporary urban landscape that is familiar to all of us who have had the fortune and misfortune of making it our home.
Michael has indeed made Delhi his home; he has lived here for more than a decade with his wife (novelist Mridula Koshy) and their children. He teaches in a school, and leads a community library movement. He walks the streets, eats roadside fruit and takes buses and the metro; these become the subject of his poetry. Consequently, it is unlike the sanitised narratives we often get from Europeans and Americans who come to India and are startled by what they see from behind the windows of AC limousines and the diplomatic congruency of Chanakyapuri. But it is not without a sense of discovery, which is very close to my heart, as like Michael, I, too, discovered this city and began writing poetry about it.
For Delhi natives, the city can seem a tad unpoetic. My friend and fellowpoet Arun Sagar has often expressed surprise about how Michael and I write poems about Delhi. But the city is home as much to its natives as it is to refugees, migrants and seasonal birds. To those of us who come here, there is much to discover: A city, especially one with so many layers of history and society, so many frequent changes, much to discover to even those with old eyes and overfamiliar with the gullis (lanes) that Ghalib found difficult to depart from.
In poem after poem, the flâneur Michael Creighton takes us to the now-demolished BRT, Badarpur, Chirag Delhi, the banks of the Yamuna. My favourite among these is “Ode to Guava”, in which he describes buying an eating the fruit from a roadside seller: “If I lived in Kochi, / I might sing for a banana; / for a mango, if I lived / in Chennai, or an apple, / if I still lived in Portland. / ...I might love / only lychee, if I dwelled / on the cusp of May and June, / but I live here in Delhi, / and now, and I hold you / above all others:” The fruit, so familiar to most of us, becomes a metaphor for this bizarre metropolis — as does lychee in a companion poem. It is not only thematically, though, but also through form — the ghazal keeps making reappearances — that this book emerges truly as one of this city of poets.
What is a city without its citizens? In Michael’s book, some of his fellow residents make appearances. There are his wife, children, students, but perhaps the most poignant poem in the book is “To Shakti on the Eight Anniversary of Her Death”, dedicated obviously to Shakti Bhatt, writer and editor, who died too early in 2007. A prose poem, it takes the reader to the banks of the dead river Yamuna. After walking around in search of water, the narrator and his companion sit down at a Tibetan joint and have tofu and beer, and watch the river: “and at that distance, Shakti, even a dead river looks lovely”. Truly, poetry is the vessel of immortality: Delhi will not remain as it is, and all of us will die, but such poems will keep us alive beyond death and oblivion.