Little letters of love
Amit Shankar Saha has quietly carved a niche for himself in the overactive world of Indian poetry in English, through a poetic style that’s devoid of any hurry. He is the author of two books, Balconies of Time and Fugitive Words, and also the founder of Rhythm Divine Poets, the cohort of Kolkata-based English versifiers. His poetry is shot through with the sort of aesthetics with which readers of Bengali poetry are familiar. Saha’s latest book, Illicit Poems, the one under review, is a slim volume of 30 short lyrics, that will pleasantly surprise those unfamiliar with his work and not disappoint in the least those familiar with him.
Take for instance the poem, “Love Letter”, which appears early in the book: “All my love letters / I write to you, / my mailman steals / them every day.” One is left wondering if the mailman is a belligerent figure, a competitor in love. The poet/narrator let the intended audience know that the mailman — a curiously American word in an Indian poem — is aware of all his dark secrets and illicit desires. The words of the letters, like words in a poem, take on a life of their own, developing “Stockholm Syndrome” for their thief.
Anyone familiar with canonical Bengali poetry will immediately recognise the echoes of Shakti Chattopadhyay’s “Hemanter Aranye Ami Postman” (The Postman in the Autumn Forest). In Chattopadhyay’s poem, the postman he observes in a yellow forest of autumn is careful with his consignment, unlike other postmen. “They are not like our postmen,” writes Chattopadhyay, “from whose hands are lost continuously our relaxed love letters.” When the figure of the postman reappears in Saha’s poem, he is no more a careful or a careless figure, but a thief of love. This puts the poet in a strange predicament: “My words to you / never gets delivered / and you think I’m / not a man of words”.
If Bengali poetry is an influence, so is canonical English poetry. (Saha has a PHD in English from Calcutta University and is a college teacher.) This influence is self-conscious. In the short lyric “Wannabe”, he pays tribute to T S Eliot while also gently ridiculing the desire of many Indian English poets to imitate his poetry: “We were out for a smoke in the balcony / when Eliot joined us for company. / Etherized in his presence we / discussed some bullshit, some poetry.” Quoting from “...Prufrock”, fashionable among English undergraduates, is deprived of gravitas by the close placement of “bullshit” and “poetry” in the same line. The poem ends: “The high priest and the poet left me / amidst the smoke a wannabe.”
Love is a recurring theme in the book, but so is the poetic process — and both are a sort of throwing the gauntlet to the readers. “Let us go for a fling / shock the world,” invites Saha in the poem “Imagine”, a title borrowed from John Lennon’s popular song. The world is too much, too boring, something like a “solved puzzle”. The invitation continues: “So let us build an eddy, / organise a turbulence, / trouble the waters, / rock the boat / and take the blame.” In the last couple of lines, the poet makes himself vulnerable and invites the reader to do so as well: “See, I have betrayed my feelings for you, / will you now do the same?”
In many ways, writing — like love — is a process of making oneself vulnerable. Saha does not hesitate to do so anywhere in this book, and that is what makes it more than ordinary.
The last six poems of the book are inspired by “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago. While all the other poems in the book are in free verse, unrhymed, these six poems take on a sort of singsong rhythm. The theme is still love, but the poems rise like a crescendo, or perhaps the sizzle of a mountain river. “My dear Lara / What is love? / Love is a ride on the flyover / with the wind in your hair” One can almost see the narrator and beloved, on a bike maybe, driving over a flyover in Kolkata, after a spell of rain, with their hair open, their heads thrown back in the wind. Proceeds from the earnings of this book will support poet Linda Ashok’s crowdfunding endeavour to provide skills training to women reeling from the effects of Covid-19 and Cyclone Amphan.