 the slum but also the representatives of the lost selves of Neelamma Aunty, Banu’s ajji, Selvi Aunty, Gita Aunty, and Fatima Aunty. The young women promise to continue the struggles of their mothers and grandmothers.
Deepa accepts her blindness and chooses her partner. Her rationality is limited to replicate the societal norms and she says, “Well I have permission from my husband to be here, so there’s nothing you can say.” In several places, she represents her mother’s unrequited love. Rukshana’s assertion, “I don’t dress like a boy. I dress like myself,” reminds her mother Fatima’s words to one of the representatives of the health department, “These people come and talk to us like we don’t know anything.” Banu’s unrecognized skills, “Poverty might make our lives ugly. But, in Banu’s drawings, our survival is full of beauty,” are similar to Banu’s ajji’s way of saving many women in the slum from their violent husbands and miscarriages.
The novel is a people’s history, a history chronicled to reflect several ideologies that project an egalitarian society. The characters’ lives become only a tool to prove Subramanian’s intentions. The novel’s language is musical, quite literally, as ‘rhythms’ and ‘symphony’ keep on recurring. Subramanian’s linguistic experiment is quite innovative and there are no parallels in the recent past except for Mohan Rao’s The Smoke is Rising. Many feelings are expressed in precise sentences abruptly punctuated with commas and periods. What makes her dialogues very innovative is that in the chapter ‘Frangipani’, the characters are called by the things they are associated with, “Earbuds says”, “Cricket Bat mumbles” and “Spectacles says.” The inner worlds of the young girls flow in a meandering river–like sentences, “Truths flat and round that fit in your palm like five-rupee coins.” Sentences are flavored with Kannada and a couple of Hindi words and carry a lot of references to popular cultures. Subramanian’s experiment is praiseworthy but doesn’t suit the context and the world she intends to create. Her ironical nomenclature Swargahalli is too Sanskritized to be the name of a slum. Poetic narration is too beautiful to be called conversations and result in inconsistent descriptions. A confident narrative voice declares, “Women who were fiercely loved, cruelly abandoned. Who woke up every morning with fists clenched, knees tensed, ready to fight. Desperate to live,” only to be contrasted with a statement like, “Everyone in Heaven is always losing all the time.” Swargahalli is populated by migrants, people hoping for a better life and orphans. Subramanian’s highly philosophical, artistic, poetic and aphoristic language does not infuse life into these characters.
To provide an inclusive universe, Subramanian forces the characters to easily accept gender differences and alternative sexual choices. Crucial scenes like Banu’s ajji witnessing her husband’s secrets get only a few paragraphs. The language, the characters’ journey and experiences are not organically related to the context but to the author’s convenience.
The scene of a foreigner clicking Swargahalli’s picture reflects the novel’s condition. “The foreign woman doesn’t call the newspaper. She doesn’t bring help. She doesn’t do much anything at all besides framing the photographs she took and hanging them in a gallery.” As the foreign woman remains alien to Swargahalli’s conditions, the narrative voices unknowingly distance themselves from the pain and agony of the slum. However, this history is a must for it genuinely tries to build a subaltern voice through various characters and hopes for a better future.
K Aravind Mitra is currently teaching in Government First grade College, Napoklu. He studied in English and Foreign Languages University and the Central University of Hyderabad. His reviews, articles and short stories have been published in The Hindu, Prajavani, and online platforms. Now, he is trying to read classical Kannada epics to write a book on Halegannada.
Mrinalini Harchandrai’s Bombay in my Beat is an evocative book of poems with well-used words and thought-through ideas. It explores the city through myriad organically–emerging categories such as gender, class, politics, ecology. Yet, the articulation of the aural sensory realm and experience trumps in this work like in few other poetry collections. One might think that to write about the city (especially Indian ones) naturally engages with the visual more, but no, not here. The aural world is inaugurated anew and how!
Cities everywhere are now officially a crucial part of our identities. “Where are you from?” is the question we ask to understand another person, replacing almost any other form of introduction, especially the odd, uncouth, “who are you?” By finding out where one is from, we seem to imagine the person in the city and know a part of them and their experience instantly. Your city is the keycode to your culture and being! It is also not surprising anymore to speak of cities as having their own character and personality. They seem to make us even as we make them—a simultaneity that is rare to find even in our most cherished relationships with other humans or with ideas.
slam building-top ambitions.
We realize how inevitable the city is to our living and how its intangible aura offers unparalleled and singularly impressionist experiences. It would not be surprising anymore if we plan our cities not for functionality but from combining scientific perspectives that tell us what variety of objects, colors and structures humans need to see and perceive to build their sensory abilities optimally. We might well be at a stage where we cannot un-think cities anymore. After all, the most nomadic of our renunciants now have relatively stable housing, within a city!
meeting only iridescent tar puddles.
From the homeless beggars at traffic signals, cafes, clubs and temple bells and patriarchy to noting changing cultural values, Harchandrai covers a lot of the experiences that are compulsorily an aspect of any city-dweller’s life.
for measured movement.
damn it, can’t slam it, Bombay’s the heart note in my beat.
or Bom Baia or Mumbai?
of a kiss in the Hanging Gardens.
Harchandrai’s voice, wherever impersonal, in small doses, comes more from being well-traveled and not from hasty assumptions about universality. Her own location is quite clearly upper middle class and she makes no attempt to hide it. In this sense and in many others, she writes what she knows. Harchandrai captures all the woes of the city in succinct images that leave you nodding in agreement and wishing there was more of these smooth–reading lines. There is occasionally a wry laugh at the collective urban self, yet I would call the poems mostly uplifting. There are emotions, of course, of slight hopelessness but they are not overpowering or excessively sentimental.
Harchandrai’s work is reminiscent of T S Eliot and Johnathan Swift’s poems, especially the latter’s, “A Description of a City Shower,” which is a critique of the anonymity and the self-centeredness of city-dwellers—a divide that is exaggeratedly present in India through language, culture and clothing. Decades later, it seems we are not done with critiquing the city yet; we have to of course critique it when it grows grotesque and cherish it when it enriches us. It seems we have replaced nature with the city as subjects of our poetry—after all, we replaced the one with the other in reality!
Harchandrai’s poems have a lot of references to music; the writer knows her writing and her music too. A must-read for fans of the never–sleeping nishachara city and the form of poetry.
Huzaifa and I wouldn’t have met had it not been for a seminar he came to attend in Kolkata. He stayed in the city for a week and we happened to meet every other day – I was mostly a listener throughout, completely taken in by his ability to recollect (and recite from heart) couplets after couplets of poetry with such effortlessness. Huzaifa had poems up his sleeve.
We are what our homes make us – broken, maimed, whole in pain, half in happiness. Huzaifa and I come from very different homes and homelands. We have grown up differently. We have learnt to compose poetry differently. We don’t have the same stories to look back to. So, where do we find a common ground? For, surely, we do. It’s probably because we have been whole in pain and half in happiness for a while now. But, then I can’t tell. We often mistake the idea of a common ground for something that arises out of the similar, the commonly familiar – what if it comes from difference? What if we find a common ground only when we learn to accept difference? Thus, it is with my comradeship with Huzaifa and his poetry. Our daily lives are often so incomparable that we come halfway despite all barriers to share stories of resistance and solidarity.
For a reader outside Kashmir, sitting comfortably in his/her bedroom, this association may seem out of