it’s a monolith, thought the gull
alighting on her shoulder

a monument, mused the spirit
whistling through her walls

a pillar, whispered the wind
twirling ‘round her limbs

a village, revealed the crier
surveying her space

a forest, roared the storm
swirling about her hair

a poem, sang the song
hearing a lute in her hum

a damask, decided the novel
etching a tale on her skin

with the sky in one eye
and the ocean in the other

she decides she’s
the gut of the earth

- Published in Global Poetry Anthology, short-listed for the Montreal International Poetry Prize

 

With flowers her belly
And buds her breasts
Waves her legs
And breeze her arms
With the moon her heart
The stars her heartbeat
The night her eyes
And rivers her dreams
The woman strides

Into the unknown

Here are John Robert Colombo’s ruminations on the woman above:

The gait of the woman brings to my mind the image of Gradiva on the bas-relief plaque that once adorned Sigmund Freud’s office in Vienna (and is now on permanent display at the Freud museum in London). The image was popularized in a turn-of-the-century novel written by a German expressionistic writer; Freud read the novel, acquired a copy of the original plaque, and proceeded to immortalize Gradiva by attempting to psychoanalyze the literary creation in a remarkable essay that constitutes a world first. I am tempted to try to do the same with Suparna’s walking woman.

I recognize everything in life is fluid. Language changes, art transforms itself. But you do not describe abstract art as realism. You would not write a 30-line poem and call it haiku, or a free-verse 40-line poem a sonnet. Over the centuries, while some features of a ghazal may have changed, the underlying structure has remained the same.

Writing free-verse poems of disjointed thoughts is a legitimate form of poetry, but it’s not a ghazal. Give it another name. Call it: Free-verse Poems of Disjointed Thoughts. Or simply, Diss-Jointed Thoughts. I will not wear torn jeans and say I’m formally dressed. I could, but you may roll your eyes.

My love affair with this form of poetry intensified as my familiarity with the Urdu language grew. Ghazal, meaning ode to women, remains rooted in love, separation, mysticism, but has also come to reflect life in all forms and spheres of human emotions and interactions. In Urdu, it is evocative, often emotionally masochistic, but always lyrical and charming, and never appears maudlin. I believe it’s because of the grace and lyricism of the Urdu language.

A ghazal is several couplets put together. Each couplet is generally independent and complete; however, they may also have a link of thought or feeling. What links the couplets may not be a common theme, but a common structure. Like a sonnet, or a haiku, a ghazal, in any language, MUST encompass and adhere to this basic structure.

The exercise of writing a ghazal in English was more difficult than I had anticipated. Giving a ghazal a title is not usual, but it does not take away from the structure either, hence a license I have taken.

INTRUSION
Even the breeze is an intrusion when you and I meet
Like a ship on the horizon where the earth and sky meet

Your eyes traced my form on the yellow and red sand
Where the roar of the waves and the gull’s cry meet

Like a distant storm your madness brews
With shuttered eyes I wait till you and I meet

Now your lights are dim and your sails are limp
Why clutch why seek why forage why meet

While each couplet stands on its own, what’s common in the couplets is the meter. The last word, or set of words, of the first couplet, are the same: meet. And, the last but one or two words in the couplet must rhyme: I, sky.

The first line of the 2^nd couplet keeps the meter in tact, but does not adhere to any rhyming. But, the second line must end with the same word or words as the first couplet, in this case: meet; and the word before that must rhyme with the corresponding ones in the first couplet, I, sky, cry, thus requiring internal rhyming.

If it appears complex, it is, somewhat. Another offering in this genre, if I may:

HEAT
Burdened with heat and high noon, summer was here always
Laden with pollen, laced with pain, the days were there always

Yes, I recall, the love made of straws, atop a neem tree
You and I built, to burn and banish, earthly fear always

On ochre days you waft by like a red summer bird
You cut through the razor rays you swoop and snare always

There are no seeds in my belly no seedlings to impart
Just a handful of sand with you I’ll share always

It was a “whatever happened to…” moment. Someone who had followed my “acting career” in Delhi once upon a time, asked me for an interview. Turned out the “someone”, Sharad Dutt, was now a prominent media personality with a long memory, and a need for immediacy to resurrect days that had faded for me but not for him. No preparation, no rehearsal, no cues, no prompts, just the camera and the lights like the days of yore. Two days later I was back in Torono for another kind of play, with life and death as the main characters. But more urgent was the task of sending today, but better still, yesterday, snapshots of my life in Toronto, via cyberspace.

The result? A quick colour portrait on film, which I invite you to view by clicking on the link below. “Play all” will take you through all three segments.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PL1909334D57007892

the pilot light

is still burning
igniting decades of dormant elements

I was borne by you

my mind inscribed
with words you whispered
flesh imprinted
with waves of your caress
skin engraved
by the ripples of a warm lake

I floated
lulled and rocked by the music
of your joy and pain

you longed for the one life

to fill your alien nights
and lonely days
to protect you
from the ravages of silence

as you would protect me fiercely

from the fires which raged outside
the walls of our hutment
none could cross to burn me
from the dust storms which turned skin
into parchment
and hair into rope strands
from the sheets of rain which tried
to penetrate but could not
your life force

my heart pressed against yours
mine on the right yours on the left
once beat in tandem
pounded as one

you taught me to breathe

today I cannot be the breath
to fuel your roar
be the carriage
of your one-woman caravan
jaunting in fierce rhythm

I cannot wrap you

in the snow mountains
of the Himalayas
roll you in the fall of river Ganges
clad you in the green waters of the Arabian sea
fold you in the red sands of Rajasthan
hide you in the foliage and forests
of rabbits and parrots

and drape you in the sky

I would if I could
inhale you into my belly
just as you conceived me in yours

your pilot light

said my daughter borne by me
of you who bore me
will burn in me
keep me alive

Holly Briesmaster and I are working in tandem on an upcoming exhibition featuring her fans and my panel paintings. The exhibition will be on at Gallery Hittite from November 5th to the 20th, with the opening reception taking place over two days – Friday the 5th from 6-9 pm and the 6th from 12-6 pm.

Here’s a snapshot of the exhibition details from the flipside of our invitation. Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Gallery Hittite is at 107 Scollard St. in Yorkville – a short walk from Bay subway station.

The woman in question has been variously described as the Lady Scholar, or the Woman Writing a Love Letter, an Indian sculpture in Khajuraho from the eleventh century, celebrated in a mural by my daughter, Shayona.

Before Pratibha Patil became the president of India, she created a furor, particularly among the Muslim clergy, for stating that the purdah (veil) was introduced in India during the Mughal rule “to save women from Mughal invaders…However, times have changed. India is now independent and hence, the systems should also change.” She was apparently referring to the Hindu women of Rajasthan in particular.

Whatever one may think of Patil, before donning the ceremonial title of the President of India, she certainly exhibited that she wore courage well. Patil’s assertion regarding the inception of the purdah was discounted by some historians. However, in his well-known book, ‘Mediaeval India’, renowned historian Satish Chandra writes that the Arabs and the Turks brought the custom to India, and consequently, it became widespread in north India. He continues, “The growth of purdah has been attributed to the fear of the Hindu women being captured by the invaders. In an age of violence, women were liable to be treated as prizes of war. Perhaps the most important factor for the growth of purdah was social – it became a symbol of the higher classes in society. And all those who wanted to be considered respectable tried to copy it. Also, religious justification was found for it.”

It always comes down to custom and culture cloaked in religion. The romantic notion of an ideal Indian woman behind a ghungat (Hindi for veil) covering her face dots many a page of Indian literature, scores of paintings from miniatures of yore to the modern, and music, classical and popular. The woman as the shy, the subservient, the subjugated, the obedient, the submissive, the secondary, or perhaps, the incidental, is surely not the woman in the sculpture above, who no doubt, was the norm, not the exception of her time.

Historian Kegan Paul inexplicably traces the custom of women in veils to the Vedic period. This is discounted by the minimal attire of the above beauty from centuries later and by the numerous erotic sculptures of the temples, where men and women experienced pleasure in each other, each an integral part of the same culture. Today, that culture is sadly defined by berating the expression of public love as an evil import of the West, and depicting an alluring woman as a gyrating half-clad damsel of a Hindi movie, her breast and midriff visible under wet apparel.

Ultimately, it always comes down to custom cloaked in culture cloaked in religion.

Always.

Colour is not just a pigment of our imagination, it is a centrifugal force which transforms the environment we inherit, create and experience, something nature knows intuitively. An arrogant parrot at an aviary, unabashedly proud of its plumes, flew on to my arm to illustrate I was no match for its flair. It made me wonder: if nature is not afraid of colour, why are we? Grey skies, grey buildings, grey sidewalks and grey suits equal a grey shroud over a choked psyche.

Matisse has been credited with introducing bright colours to modern art. There has been no dearth of vibrant colours in centuries old creations of the East, be it in folk art, the caves of Ajanta in India from 2 B.C., or the religious symbols in temples. Looking through the pages of art history, we can codify the social and philosophical mores of the times, the freedom, the repression, harmony or chaos, mysticism or reality, juxtaposed in wheels of colour. It may just be that the plants and flowers of certain climes, the sources we derive colour from, coaxed the physical, psychological and cultural acceptance of scintillating hues in everyday lives, including the creation of art and attire.

Colours do not just interact with each other, they invite communication within and between
us. I’ll share a poem with you from my book, Sandalwood Thoughts, entitled, Palette.

I think in black and white.
I love in fiery marigold
Laugh in lotus pink
Fight in vermillion
Hate in green
Mate in amber
Recoil in silver
Fear in ultramarine
Whimper in auburn
Die each night
In catatonic yellow.

I remain
Unable, or unwilling
To penetrate the panoply
Of nine emotions.

Frida Kahlo described her “artistic” encounter with Diego Rivera:

I took four little pictures to Diego who was painting up on the scaffolds at the Ministry of Public Education. Without hesitating a moment I said to him, ‘Diego, come down,’ and so, since he is so humble, so agreeable, he came down. ‘Look, I didn’t come to flirt with you or anything, even though you are a womanizer, I came to show you my painting. If it interests you, tell me so, if it doesn’t interest you, tell me that too, so I can get to work on something else to help out my parents.’ He told me, ‘Look, I’m very much interested in your painting, especially this self-portrait which is the most original. The other seem to me to be influenced by what you’ve seen. Go on home, paint a picture, and next Sunday, I’ll come to see it and tell you.’ So I did, and he said, ‘You have talent’.

In the context of what I am seeking, this is not that revealing for they were not yet involved. Later, after the encounter culminated in marriage, the stormy couple fed off each other’s talent and volatility, and Diego said of Frida’s paintings:

Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman’s body and of female sexuality. In an interview in 1953, Diego described Frida’s work:

Frida Kahlo is the greatest Mexican painter. Her work is destined to be multiplied by reproductions and will speak, thanks to books, to the whole world. It is one of the most formidable artistic documents and most intense testimonies on human truth of our time.

Diego’s words of admiration, though spoken from the prism of an intensely personal relationship between two artists, resonate even today. Sudhir too is an artist and has known many. I am transcribing his view of my paintings, believing that he set his emotions, huge or small, biased or predisposed, aside when he said the following:

It is as difficult to typecast Suparna as it is to imprison Picasso in neat little packages of the Blue, Pink and Neo-classical periods.Suparna too cannot be buttonholed in cleverly worked out cliches. Her prodigious protean energy would militate against any such labeled theorizing. In this she is one with Heraclitus  when he says: Everything is in a flux. You cannot step into the same river twice.” Or, again, with Gottfried Benn: There is no outer reality. Only the inner which is constantly moulding, re-moulding and building new worlds out of its own creativity.”

To wit, just when you think you can safely posit her work in a deteriorating urban landscape of malaise and moral decay, she steps away by producing a body of work where colour literally goes ballistic in a series of exasperatingly beautiful bronze bas-reliefs of chiming ankle bells, bracelets and nose rings. And these hallucinatory lovely figures are breathlessly close to the friezes and frescoes of India’s temples. Like them, Suparna’s forte is the female nude, so sensuously invoked, drawn, painted, that the “Song of Solomon” pales in comparison.

Yet again, Suparna, with a magical sleight of hand, shifts your focus to another genre – her social and political satirical drawings, thrumming with wit and humour, with the horse as metaphor.

However, behind Suparna’s shifting smokescreen of life’s constant flux, lies the grandeur of a harmonious whole. Of “darshan”, loosely translated as a unified, intuited vision, where all contradictions are laid to rest and she reveals herself as a communicator of beauty, supreme and insatiable.

I’ll allow myself to revel in these superlative observations, believing these to be objective, removed from sentiments. Just as I will accept Sudhir’s spontaneous response to poet and critic, Mukund Dave, regarding my poems and drawings:

Suparna draws ingeniously on many devices — literary and surrealist, now-you-see-me; now–you-don’t, ‘to lead you up the incline…’ and throw you into a beautifully hallucinatory world — a world that teeters between dream and reality; between Venus’ flying locks in Botticelli’s painting and Penelope’s unending knitting of the scroll, awaiting Odysseus’s return. How effortlessly does she straddle the three worlds of myth, folklore and surrealism is magical. Really.

Here’s to you. Happy Anniversary.

Why do we care when the Americans see our differences so clearly? Who? Them Canadians? You mean the ones who wear parkas in July? The ones who let just anyone into their country and export the worst of them to us? Oh, the 9/11 bunch. Well, if you insist, they did not come from Canada.

Did you say they actually have buildings and roads and summer? And those Canadian geese, I tell you!

Listen, there must be a difference. It’s a question of identity. Hey, I know. People from the world over, every color, language, food, every ethnic fight imaginable. They are here and
celebrated. It’s called multiculturalism and it’s uniquely ours, ours and ours alone.

But on a visit to New York it seemed I had landed in a bigger Toronto. People from the world over, every color, language, food, every ethnic fight imaginable. In fact, a Bangladeshi cab driver announced that had my spoken Bengali not endeared me to him, he would have told me what exactly he thought of those Indian Bengalis who steal water from their rivers.

The mighty Chinatown. The Korean corner store owner. The Somali model. Grants handed out generously for classical Indian dance forms; sarod and sitar maestros from India ensconced in prestigious universities; vocal classical and tabla (Indian drums)
players performing in concert and harmony. And Sanskrit taught in universities.

So no “official” multiculturalism for sure, but I concede in reality it’s very much a part of the urban U.S. landscape. In practice, not much difference there.

Peace. Yes, we propound brotherhood, eschew wars, and our young men and women are keepers of peace among warring tribes in countries far and wide. Well, not exactly any more. The lines have been blurred.

I’ve got it. There is a difference. Rights. We have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Rights without responsibilities. The very first thing I learn when I come to the country. The right to become a citizen. Abandon the country soon after and demand rescue from the pickle I find myself in, for I am a Canadian and it’s my right. Return briefly after spending years “back home” and realize with horror and indignation that I have to wait for three months to qualify for treatment. Instant treatment is my right. I am a Canadian. Complain. “Back home I had …”. This, a country of our choice, a country we adopted of our own volition. But complain we must. And I don’t mean about the wicked witch of a weather. I am a Canadian and I have the right to complain. Period. I want my rights.

We are different after all. Them Americans and us Canadians.