topics: |  poetry | single-author | india | english

Many of the poems in this collection leave me cold, though some do work.  I
get the feeling that some poems are too heavily crafted, and the lucid
flow of emotion is missing.

The title poem is a recollection from her childhood, and there are flashes
of interest:
		her right hand is firm
		and fast and moves like a fish
		fanning in and out of the waves -
			blind, mute,
		her hand zigzags making pleats
		so fast I cannot count them
and you wish she hadn't inserted the inanity of that last line.  The rest of
the poem - how she's wearing khadi and not silk, and the colours of saris -
don't work for me at all.

Some of the better poems are about her family
(The virologist, p.21; Honeymoon - about her grandmother).  On the whole,
like Arvind Mehrotra says in his eloquent review (excerpted below),
the poems are "exasperatingly uneven".

Honeymoon p.48

Before you could become a grandmother
you had to be someone's mother-in-law.
The hint of _tulsi in the air,
the shape of Shiva's shadow
in your _puja room sugggested
you had to find the best for your eldest son.

But in the end it was difficult
to hand over your son to another woman -
especially one so beautiful,
one considered to be so perfect
in her goodness like the heroine
	in the legend
who is always saved by the birds
and the deer in the forest.

Perhaps it was difficult
to face a woman who stood up to your will:
flawless with the strength of her patience.

I remember your power - stainless steel,
its clean smell in your kitchen.
I remember learning to become invisible,

 		invisible,

Once, when I was four,
I put my fist into my mouth:
slowly - finger by finger -
until my mouth was so stuffed
not a sound could come out-
no one could hear me
   	and I was invisible.

No one could see me but I could see you,
I could see the two of you
	I could see
the hurt darkness in my mother's eyes
turn into stones -
and the stones stayed - stuck -
the stones were tight in my throat
when I was invisible.

I remember your power -
Your distance: triumphant.
And the lack of any horizon in your face.
But I always wanted to know, grandmother,
_what had you been denied?
What great bitterness was it
that made you decide
your twelve-year old daughter, my father's sister
had to accompany my parents
on their honeymoon?

The mammoth bone p. 89

A Dutch fisherman
fishing on the Dogger Bank
caught a mammoth bone in his net -

You carried it home
through the traffic - gently -
it rested on your shoulder -

A thigh bone
from a fully grown mammoth
who had lived a good life,
a long life, we imagine -

A bone pockmarked
with small mollusks.

Later, I carried it through the house
upstairs and down
from room to room
not knowing where
to put it - such a huge thing -
and so heavy -

I was wary -
sceptical -

But you were right:
Sooner than I thought
it became a part of our home -

Now it lies beneath my desk,
near my feet - like a dog
tired and happy
after a long walk -

	(see Mehrotra's review below for that Emily Dickinsonian "dash" at
	the end)

from Partition, p.34

  [again, the poem, about her mother's memories of failing to do charitable
	work at the railway station during independence, is too prosaic, and
	these lines, coming at the end, are quite abrupt. ]
How could they
  have let a man
who knew nothing
    about geography
divide a country?

Review by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

The anxiety of being Sujata in The Hindu, 2001

There is an unevenness to Sujata Bhatt's Indian poems because she feels
compelled to put on her post-colonial hat. Her European poems are
invigorating...

Since writers are autobiographical creatures, and the poets among them are
more obviously autobiographical than the novelists, it is not surprising to
find Sujata Bhatt telling us as much as she does about herself and her family
in her poems.  Looking at just those in her new collection, her fourth if we
do not count the selected poems that appeared in 1997, we learn that her
father, a virologist, was living in the United States, in New Orleans, in the
early 1950s.

Bhatt's father's mother thought less of her beautiful, fair-complexioned
daughter-in-law than the New Orleans bus driver did. She comes across as
another Miss Ghaswalla, another of those wicked old crones that leap out of
story books, petrifying the child the story is being told to. Honeymoon is
addressed to her and this is how it concludes:

	  What great bitterness was it
	  that made you decide
	  your twelve-year-old daughter, my father's sister,
	  had to accompany my parents
	  on their honeymoon?

[Mehrotra has flashes of vituperativeness so characteristic of him - read
him stabbing Ezekiel in his Twelve Modern Indian Poets -
but you  sense that these digs are asides, that he means well.  Here we have
him on Bhatt's "Diabetes Mellitus":]
This is school magazine stuff at best, but, to be also fair to
her, not all the poems in My Mothers Way of Wearing a Sari are quite as bad.
... "A Mammoth Bone" flows from beginning to end
with great rapidity, its short lines lifting cleanly off the page, without
muddle or obfuscation. Too many commas and full-stops would have been almost
like an impediment. The punctuation aids the poem; the poem justifies the
punctuation. The dash comes from Emily Dickinson of course, and it is a
tribute to Bhatt's craft that she has used it to good effect.

Sujata Bhatt, then, is an exasperatingly uneven poet. She can write like a
novice, and, again, she can write like someone who knows her job and takes
pride in the fact that she can do it well. 
The difference between Sujata Bhatt's Indian poems and her European ones is
that when she is writing the former she feels compelled to put on her
postcolonial, multicultural hat [...]
, so much so that she titles one poem "The
when she uses the word khadi in one of her poems, she finds it necessary to
gloss it in the next line: it is hand-spun, hand-woven cotton. Fortunately,
poetry is not what they're scenting after here. At least not yet.