topics: |  poetry | india | english

Ever since I came across Sampurna Chattarji's superlative work in the Tenth Rasa, a first attempt at translating pan-Indian nonsense verse, I have been intrigued by her superb poetry skills.

I mean, any poet worth her salt must be able to versify. It's like Picasso; much before he did the Guernica, we knew he could do superlative work like the portrait of his mother. We know T.S. Eliot could write about Growltiger, or wearing his trousers rolled, or that Tagore could write the verses of bhAnusimha, and this prepares us to accept abstractions such as Prufrock or shAjAhAn.

Writing poetry has become an act of retreat, of salvaging that very private self that fiction seems to be overwhelming. Perhaps I cherish it all the more fiercely for that very reason. - Sampurna Chatterjee, interview in The Hindu

Birthplace p.3

    To Alemithu, the Ethiopian nanny I never knew

Stay.  I am from your land.
Unseen map so vivid in my mind,
treasured, unfolded, so many times.

A land of skin and womb and mamma's breath.
Sun in a patch of shade
cradled between her thighs.

Mysterious, though the smell of butter in my hair
and pepper on my tongue
seems familiar, like a witch's cat.

Flat roasted round of bread:
one small piece was mine
broken by her fingers eaten by my pores.

Who was I, when I was born, faraway,
ninemonths breathing the sweat of salt and sky
so blue in the morning, so gladhearted by noon?

Whose words were those singing to my unformed ears,
easing open my tightfisted thumbs
and teaching me to clutch?

Whose longboned hands bathed and oiled
and slapped alive my olive skin?
Whose white teeth smiled and spoke in tongues

unheard and riddled with strange sounds?
Whose land was it you come from?
Stay.  Tell me if it was mine.

Age p.4

	_(or when did she grow so old?)_

Can you feel her bones under your fingers?
My arms hold a smaller bundle of flesh
than they did before.
Once, she held me bundled in her arms.
Now, she barely fills the space
between my body
and her embrace.

The S-Word p.16

Sliver

I'd like to be
A sliver of orange
Turned inside out
And eaten.

--
Snatch

There is a song
that comes between us.
I listen to it in silence.
He listens in sorrow.
I never ask him what it means.
I know.
And so, between us the song sits,
a mute accomplice,
a shred of doubt
between my teeth.

--
Stain

Last night,
when the moon came up,
the egg began to hatch.
A lightning crack.
A scarlet beak.
And last,
a vivid flow
of inconsolable turquoise blood.

--
Simmer

A boil sprouts on her knee.
As it festers she pesters it
to yield its oozing centre.
She worries the skin around it
inflamed with indignity.
She fondles it almost
but breaks off before it bursts.
Suddenly all over her they spring,
lewd, uninvited.
She boils over
like a cauldron
covered and unattended.

Fear and the Smell of Old Sheets p.21

I saw her once and that was enough.

At the oddest times she comes back to me.
Her flesh rearranged in alarming patterns.
Fluid. Writhing.
I remember the way her ivory shoulder slipped
out of her blouse almost unconsciously
saluting the man sitting behind her.
Pretending not to be anything more
than polite acquaintances.
Hullo how are you long time I’m fine.

Who knows what their chemicals said to each other?
Their hair their skin their secret places?
That shoulder gave her away.
And with every liquid ripple of that smooth and scornful skin
my muscles creaked. My saliva dried.
My tongue screamed. If I could have spoken
I wouldn’t have.

She's not the woman he loved for her sex.
She's not the woman he loved for her soul.
In her they came together.
Soul and sex flesh and fear.
Each time he bit her ear
he drew a magic sword.

I fear her power. I fear her flawless flesh.
I fear the thought of the two of them
shaking out the dust of old sheets and sinking
into each other again.

Object lesson : two

I ride my bicycle to ride my bicycle. 
				- Zen proverb

I park you on my palm,
testing you for posture (and pedals -
they really work).  Velocipede of wire,
your red and silver symmetries make
centuries of tinkering seem trivial.  You
are a miniature of perfection, you scorn
your previous selves, their names creak
ing like their movements.  You do not
see the poetry of Celerive and
Draisinne, the rough humour
of the boneshaker
the hobbyhorse the
highwheeler trundling down towards
you, so neat in your sprocket and chain.
You do not care that
a French count or a German baron
a Scottish blacksmith a Parisian carriage
maker and a stolid Englishman saw you
in their dreams.  And as for being (maybe)
a doodle in a certain Italian's notebook, the
name da Vinci doesn't ring a bell.  Your
past is monumentally incidental.  You
are all here, now, parked on my palm,
content with yourself
as a tiny replica of you.

The book is divided into six sections, which seem to the poet "as if they
were written by a series of previous selves."

Going against the Grain: She has just given up her career in advertising
	for a life of domesticity and writing.
Snakes of Tar: anxieties in Bombay, experiments with making language
	reflect the "derangement of everyday events"
Bodies of women: "I turned the gaze away from myself to other women
	... [looking] at women as a painter would."
Sight readings: Questions "of seeing and sight, made suddenly urgent after
	the discovery of a tear in my retina, and the possibility of further
	degeneration.
Object Lessons: Attempt to give a series of cherished objects a materiality
	other than the physical.  A way of ensuring they would exist even if
	I ceased to be able to see them.

Going against the Grain

Birthplace 				 3
Age 					 4
Strangers 				 5
Bloody deeds 				14
    Beetroot burns blood red in water.
    A slow and insolent bleach.
    A taunt to the knife that killed it.
The S-Word 				16
Fear and the Smell of Old Sheets        21
Fairytale 				22
All the Goddesses 			23
Pleasure, forbidden 			26

Snakes of Tar

The way it grows 			30
Impression: Dough 			31
Impression: Door 			32
The describing : 			33
Dogs, mobs and rock concerts 		35

Rigor mortification 			37

	There is a corpse in the room.
	We brought it here ourselves.
	Mama said, isn’t it heavier than it ought.
	We were too sad to pay attention.
	They were all coming to see the body.
	All of them.
	Some from as far away as home.
	No, we were too sad to listen.
	And too busy making tea.
	Such a rainy morning.
	The sewers had burst.
	The plank outside our door was wobbling.
	Mausi couldn’t find the house.
	Ravi found her, sari hitched above her knees.

	[...]

	The corpse in the room is a stranger.
	[...]

	Are strangers burning our dead?

Illusion 				39
Journey on a grey day I and II   	40
After the journey 			41
Signal on a rainy day I and II   	42
Couple, riding home 			43
Boxes   				44

The bodies of women

Amplitude 				47
   Her hips speak volumes about her
   ... no frigid fires here
   burning coldly beneath the ice
	   ... casual flesh
   worn well and tossed and turning.
   The sea heaves at her every step

   Watch the way she walks.
   Young. Well-swung.
   I am watching her.
   Her hips are all I see.
Drawing 				48
Ravishing 				49
   Her skin burnt holes in my eyes
   piercing through her long white dress...
   All was bared, all concealed
   in those arms.
Hidden   				50
Obscene  				51
Markings I and II 			52

Word, walk on glass

Kiln 					55
A memory of logs 			57
Crossing 				58
Still life in motion 			60
Entries 				62
Salt 					67

Sight readings

Brahma's eyes   			70
Conversation 				71
To Surya, the Sun-God   		73
Darkness 				74
Cyclops 				75
Evil Eye 				76
Blind As 				77
Third Eye 				78

Object Lessons

Object Lesson: One 			81
Object Lesson: Two 			82
Object Lesson: Three 			83
Object Lesson: Four 			84
Object Lesson: Five 			85
Object Lesson: Six 			86
Object Lesson: Seven 			88
Object Lesson: Eight 			89
Object Lesson: Nine 			90
Object Lesson: Ten 			91
Object Lesson: Eleven   		92

Afterword 				93

Author bio

Sampurna Chattarji was born in Dessie, Ethiopia in November 1970 (see the
poem Birthplace.  She grew up in Darjeeling, graduated from Lady
Sriram, New Delhi, and worked in advertising (J Walter Thompson, Kolkata and
Mumbai) for seven years before becoming a full-time writer.

The focus on seeing in the book may be partly physical, for Sampurna suffers
from a vision impairment, a severe myopia.  At one point she writes:

	Questions "of seeing and sight, made suddenly urgent after
	the discovery of a tear in my retina, and the possibility of further
	degeneration.

What attracted my attention to Chattarji was her work in the Tenth Rasa,
which selects a large number of her translations of the nonsense poems by
Sukumar Ray - Wordygurdyboom! (Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray)
She also has a number of books of traditional short stories etc.

She was awarded the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Scholarship to
Edinburgh University in 2005 and the Highlights Foundation Scholarship to
the Highlights Writers Workshop at Chautauqua, New York in 2006. June 2009
saw the publication of Sampurna's first novel Rupture from HarperCollins. -
http://sampurnachattarji.wordpress.com/

Lives in Mumbai.