Classical Art Classical Art Woman Leaning on Pillar Red Towel on Head Franklin
Kala Ghoda Poems
Arun Kolatkar
Kolatkar, Arun;
Kala Ghoda Poems
Pras Prakashan, Bombay, 2004 [Rs 360 / $25]
ISBN 819021103X
topics: | poesy | india | english
As can be seen from the wrapper on this dec2006 3d reprint of the 2004 volume, there is a loud fizz about Kolatkar's poetry, and this particular volume. Its been in that location for some years at present.
I first encountered him in Mehrotra's Twelve Modern Indian Poets, just no copy of Jejuri was to be establish... I made do for some years with pieces from Mehrotra, and also from Nandy'due south viral anthology, strangertime and somewhen, I picked upward the NYRB re-issue (with the Amit Chaudhuri intro), which was well worth information technology. By then Kala Ghoda Poems was making waves and the snippets I saw here and there on the web and in Jeet Thayil'south threescore Indian poets whetted my appetite further. Eventually a friend who was also on the chase, managed to accept them picked up from Pras Praksashan itself - both this book and Sarpa Satra, and we read both at incoherent speed.
I found KGP far stronger and easier to relate to than Sarpa Satra, which uses a mythic base to reflect on mod times. In contrast, KGP explores the urban setting of Bombay, occasionally using historical vignettes. It was clear that the poems were constructed with the aforementioned jaundiced heart that informs Jejuri - a similar disinterested view of events and juxtapositions, with the mythical elements replaced by the historical. To give a quick flavour of the terrific originality of vision, hither is a fragment from the longest verse form in the book - Breakfast at Kala Ghoda (#14), where at a clemency meal, a huge box of idlis is opened:
with the collective sigh of a hundred idlis waiting to exhale followed by a rush to the go out -- a landslide of fullmoons slithering past each other, to tumble in a jumble, and pile up in a shallow handbasket, an orgy, a palpitating hill of naked idlis slipping and sliding clambering over and suffocating each other.
the kAlA ghoRA (statue of rex George) in S. Mumbai, the statue was removed in the 1960s, but the area still has the name. Many of the poems relate to buildings and roadside scenes in the Kala Ghoda expanse of Mumbai, noted for its many fine art museums. Kala Ghoda [kAlA = black, ghoRA=equus caballus] is a reference to a blackened bronze statue of king George which stood in the district until the 1960s, and lent its name to the area for posterity. Kolatkar went to fine art school in this area, and the Artists' Aid Fund center on Rampart row was where co-ordinate to Dilip Chitre, he and other struggling artists "assembled every day, hoping for a heir-apparent to plough up." Information technology was here that he met his starting time wife, Darshan Chhabda, and he spent much of his life hanging out at the shops and fine art galleries and restaurants in this area. At the time these poems were written, at that place were many slums in this part of the city, most of which have now been extirpated; all the same many of the scenes described, such every bit the running afterward kerosene, or the jostling crowds at a charitable food distribution, hold for many of the poorer areas in any city. Some of the architectural landmarks (such as the relief of David Sassoon'due south face on the library named later him) relate more specifically to this area of Bombay. At that place are several references to "Wayside Inn" - a bar in the Kala Ghoda area frequented by Kolatkar over five decades. The history of Bombay is tightly interwoven into these poems, and is anthropomorphized, as in the pi-canis familiaris who looks "a fleck like a seventeenth-century map of Bombay", or with Sassoon who lives through much of the history of this district, and is often mocked gently, as with the incongruity of importing foxhounds to Republic of india past a British ambassador, or in this monologue by a drunk: Shit metropolis, he thunders; the lion of Mumbai thunders, Shit metropolis! I shit on you lot. You lot were a group of seven shitty islands given in dowry to the Shit Male monarch of Ing to shit on The poems are full of strongly contrasting juxtapositions - as in the intense love of a young girl for her lover - in the scene described he has just been released from jail, and he is resting with his head on her lap, as if information technology were a harp. But information technology is lice that she is picking: producing arpeggios of lice and harmonics of nits... Much of the text excerpted here was available on many websites. I have stitched up some fragments and typed in a expert bit to create a adequately all-encompassing set of poems; eleven poems (marked by "*", are available in their entirety.
Contents
Pi-domestic dog 15 * Parameshwari 25 Meera 26 Song of Rubbish 34 * A Note on the Reproductive Cycle of Rubbish 35 * To a Crow 36 The Ogress 39 * Silver Triangle 45 Pinwheel 49 * An Former Wheel Tyre 52 * Lice 56 Kerosene 59 Knucklebones 66 To a Charas Pill 70 A game of Tigers and Sheep 72 * The Barefoot Queen of the Crossroads 74 Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda 80 Words for a Cellist 114 The Shit Sermon 115 Watermelons 120 The Boomtown Lepers' Ring 124 * Bon Appetit 125 * A Blind man Strings a Cot 127 The Potato Peelers 132 The Rat-poisonous substance Man'south Lunch Hour 134 David Sassoon 142 Man of the Yr 155 * Traffic Lights 162 * also see beneath for extracts from Reviews by * Bruce Rex * Menka Shivdasani * Prabhakar Acharya
Excerpts
Pi-canis familiaris : p. xv-24
1. This is the fourth dimension of day I like best, and this is the hour when I tin call this metropolis my ain; when I like nothing better than to prevarication down here, at the exact middle of this traffic island (or trisland as I call it for short, and as well to suggest a triangular island with rounded corners) that doubles as a parking lot on working days, a corral for more than fifty cars,
when it'south deserted early in the morn, and I'g the only sign of intelligent life on the planet; the concrete surface hard, flat and cool against my abdomen, my lower jaw at residuum on crossed forepaws; merely about where the equestrian statue of what's-his-name must've stood one time, or and then I imagine.2. I wait a chip like a seventeenth-century map of Bombay with its seven islands non joined nonetheless shown in solid black on a body the color of old parchment; with Old Adult female'southward Island on my forehead, Mahim on my croup, and the others distributed casually among brisket, withers, saddle and loin - with a pirate's rather than a cartographer's regard for accuracy. 3. I like to trace - no proof of course, just a strong family unit tradition matrilineally, to the just bitch that proved tough plenty to have survived, first the long voyage, and and so the wretched conditions here -- a combination that killed the rest of the pack of thirty foxhounds, imported all the style from England. by Sir Bartle Frere in eighteen hundred and sixty-four, with the crazy idea of introducing fox-hunting to Bombay. Merely the sort of thing, he felt the city badly needed. [Sir Bartle Frere was a British colonial ambassador.] 4. On my father'southward side the line goes back to the canis familiaris that followed Yudhishthira on his last journey, and stayed with him till the very stop; long after all the others - Draupadi showtime, and then Sahadeva, and so Nakul, followed past Arjuna and, last of all Bhima- had fallen past the wayside. Domestic dog in tow, Yudhishtira alone plodded on. Until he besides, frostbitten and blinded with snow, dizzy with hunger and gasping for air, was nearly to collapse in the icy wastes of the Himalayas; when help came in the shape of a flying chariot to airlift him to sky. Yudhishthira, the noble toll, refused to get on lath unless dogs were immune. And my ancestor became the only dog to accept made it to sky in recorded history. 5. To find a more moving case of human being's devotion to dog, we have to get out the realm of history, skip a few thousand years and selection upwards a work of science fantasy - Harlan Ellison'southward'A Boy and his Domestic dog' [ 1969 science fiction brusk story ] a cultbook amid pi-dogs everywhere in which the 'Boy' of the title sacrifices his honey, and serves upwards his girlfriend as dogfood to salvage the life of his starving canine master. 6. I answer to the proper name of Ugh. No, not the assertion of disgust; simply the U pronounced equally in Upanishad and gh not silent, but as in ghost, ghoul or gherkin. It's short for Ughekalikadu, Siddharamayya's famous dog that I was named after, the guru of Kalidevayya'south domestic dog who could recite the four Vedas backwards. My own cognition of the scriptures begins and ends, I'm afraid, with just one mantra, or verse; the tenth, from the sixty-second hymn in the third mandala of the Rig (And to think that the Rig lone contains x one thousand five hundred and fifty ii verses). Information technology's composed in the Gayatri metre, and it goes: Om tat sat savitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhimahi dhiyo yonah prachodayat. Twenty-four syllables, exactly, if yous count the initial Om Please don't ask me what information technology means, though. All I know is that information technology's addressed to the sun-god - hence it is called Savitri - and it seems appropriate enough to recite it every bit I sit here waiting for the sun to rise. May the lord's day-god dilate the powers of my mind. seven. What I like about this time and place - every bit I lie hither hugging the ground, my jaw at rest on crossed forepaws, my optics level with the welltempered just gaptoothed keyboard of the black-and-white concrete blocks that class the border of this trisland and give me my primary horizon - is that I am left completely undisturbed to work in peace on my magnum opus: a triple sonata for a circumpiano based on three singled-out themes - ane suggested by a magpie robin, some other past the wail of an ambulance, and the third by a rockdrill; a piebald pianist, caressing and tickling the concreted keys with his eyes, undeterred by digital impecuniousness. 8. As I play, the city slowly reconstructs itself, rock by numbered stone. Every stone seeks out his brothers and is joined by his neighbours. Every unmarried crack returns to its flagstone and all is forgiven. Trees arrive at themselves, each one ready to give an account of its leaves. The mahogany drops a catafalque bursting with winged seeds by the wayside, like an inexperienced thief drops stolen jewels at the sight of a cop. St. Andrews' church tiptoes back to its place, shoes in hand, like a husband after belatedly-dark revels. The academy, you'll be glad to know, can never go lost because, although forgetful, it always carries its address in its pocket. 9. My olfactory organ quivers. A many-coloured smell of innocence and lavender, mildly acidic perspiration and boom polish, rosewood and rosin travels similar a lighted fuse up my olfactory organ and explodes in my brain. It's not the leggy young girl taking a curt cutting through this island as usual, violin case in hand, and tardily again for her music class at the Max Muller Bhavan, so much every bit a alarm to me that my idyll volition soon be over, that the time has come for me to surrender the city to its so-called masters.
seven islands of mumbai circa. 1700, when ceded to the british past the portuguese. (paradigm: tifr)
Parameshwari 25
The faint but unmistakable olfactory property of cheap tobacco in the air betrays the presence of Parmeshwari, the piping-smoking mama the old lavatory attendant sitting all past herself ...
Meera 26
A fancy-free coconut frond a dropout, bored with life at the top
Song of Rubbish 34
[Grapes underfoot aspire to greatness, Clay in potter'south hand... ] We too take our ain tryst with destiny, and feel the birth-pangs of a new city, but prepare for a long period of exile in the wilderness of a landfill site.
Note on the Reproductive Cycle of Rubbish : p35
It may not look like much. But sentry out when rubbish meets rubbish in the back of a truck, and more rubbish in a whole caravan of trucks, so some more in a vast landfill site where it matures. Rubbish ovulates just one time in its lifetime. releasing pheromones during the period of its fertility. Driven wild by the odour speculators in rut arrive on the scene in droves, their chequebooks hanging out, and slug information technology out among themselves. Rubbish waits. Patiently. And copulates with the winner
To a Crow : p36-38
That was smoothen, Mr. Crow - a perfect landing. You swoop down from the Y axis of the tree (a black blur in free fall) stretch your wings and level off forth the baseline of the pavement, executing a perfect hyperbolic curve with throwaway ease, until you just skim along, requite yourself a slight elevator, and touch on down. Oh, that was just beautifully done -you, you, yous airdevil! And you lot did it simply correct; y'all landed a twiglength abroad from it. Because you tin can't just jump on it with both your anxiety, yous know, as you lot would on a dead rat. And you can't just walk right up to it and selection information technology up either. No no no no no. The frontal approach volition never exercise; this is a delicate matter. You lot can't beget to permit your interest evidence. You saw it first. Sure, but does it vest to anyone? Look around carefully. Is at that place anyone in sight who looks like he may have a legal claim to it? What most that bearded man with a briefcase in his hand? Does he have an eye on it, yous remember? What about the lady lawyer accompanying him? No, they're merely waiting for a taxi. Sneak a look at it. It'south not merely a crack on the pavement, is it? Are yous sure? And it'southward not about to crawl abroad eiter, is information technology? Well then - now. Tactfully, tactfully. Movement sideways, without looking at it. Not all at one time, but in two steps; a side shuffle, more like. And there y'all are. Now! Stand on it. A twig! A twig! A twig! A twig! A twig! You got it! You got it! You got it! It's all yours, at present. ...
The Ogress : p.39-44
One side of her confront (the right one) is man enough; but the other, where the muscles are all fused together, burnt peradventure, or melted downwardly with acid - I don't know which- is all scar tissue and looks more like a side of bacon. * The one-eyed ogress of Rope Walk Lane (one breast removed, hysterectomized, a crown of shut-cropped moth-eaten hair, gray, on a caput half-covered in a scarecrow sari) has always been a kind of an auxiliary mother semi-official nanny and babe-bather in chief to a whole chain of children born to this street. * Give her a bucket filled with h2o, a bit of soap and an unwashed child - the dirtier the better - and the wispy half-smile that ever plays on the skilful side of her face loses its unfinished await without completing itself; and she gets a wicked gleam in her right eye every bit she starts unwrapping her souvenir - the naughtier the better - and she is never so happy as when she has a tough client on her hands, ans she has wishked his nappy off - like now for example. * Soap in eye, a furious, foaming male child - very angry, very moisture - cradled lengthwise and face up down on her spindly legs, extended jointly and straight before her, she sits on the edge of the pavement; facing the road, sari pulled up to her crotch, and her instruments of torture within easy accomplish; an empty, sky-bluish plastic mug bobbing upward and down gleefully in a bucket of water. * As grown fingers lather him, catch ass scrub and knead his mankind, the headlong male child, end-stopped by the woman's feet pointing skyward, nose downward between her ankles, and restricted by her no-win shins, is overrun past swirling galaxies of backsliding cream that collide, course and re-form, slither up and down and wrap around the curved space of his glace body, black as moisture slate. * She turns him on his flip side and, face clenched, he kicks her in the crotch; starts bawling and shaking his fists at the world; but she grabs both his feet with 1 hand, crumples his face, pulls his ears, tweaks his olfactory organ, probes his nostrils, twists his artillery, polishes his balls, plays with his pintle and hits him with three mugs full of cold water in quick succession. * The water cascades downwardly his sides; information technology sluices downwardly her legs that form a bridge over a lenghthening river of bath water flowing downwardly the kerbside similar frothing star-broth that volition be swallowed upwardly by a rat-hole waiting for it farther downstream. * And, after the flood, when the ogress lifts him upwardly in the air and sets him down on solid ground - dripping wet but all in one piece - feeling a chip like Noah, bow-legged and tottering he stands, supported by an adult hand nether an armpit, but still on his own two feet, and a street-fighting homo already. * When the ogress throws a towel over him and starts drying him, he nods unsteadily - for he is notwithstanding not quite able to balance his head - looks around at the whole honking globe that has massed its buildings menacingly around him and he already knows-- what his response is going to be. He points his little water cannon ath the earth in general and (Correct! Piss on information technology, boy) shoots a perfect arc of piss, brawny and luminous in the morning time sun.
Pinwheel 49
1. A little strip of paper, with a twist in the middle and stuck through with a pin, makes a frail propeller, no bigger than a dragonfly; only it begins to spin. Not all at once. Halting at first, a tremor, a twitch, a intermission. Some other twitch, a cautious revolution, a small-scale hitch. A sudden counter-revolution (smashing) followed past a longish pause to assimilate the lessons learnt. Simply once it understands its hidden purpose, it begins to rev upwardly in real earnest; and should be able to develop the thrust required to lift the skinny ten-twelvemonth-old boy-inventor of the pinwheel who, bare-arse naked, has been running effectually the traffic island in crazy circles that, by now, accept evolved into a figure 8 pattern, pinwheel held by he tail-cease of the pivot in a pinch; a streamlined arm extended earlier him similar a fuselage in the slipstream of the paper propeller; shoulder, elbow, wrist, all beautifully aligned to the axis of the pivot; and the other arm raised sideways like a wing. 2. A pi-domestic dog, who thinks of himself equally the original inhabitant of the island, watches him out of the corner of his centre with increasing unease. He knows he is looking at that most dangerous affair on earth, a young boy with a newfound toy; and but can't wait for him to accept off – and boom into the nearest raintree, come crashing down through the roof of the chief'southward house on top of Elphinstone College, or, afterwards circling over the city in an ever-widening screw, disappear birthday into the blue (sigh!), in a falling star shower far also insignificant for any observatory on world to tape.
An Old Bicycle Tyre
An erstwhile bicycle tyre I may be, a baldheaded cycle peel and countless eel, a wobbly null, a spastic shunya but that doesn't mean I'1000 ready to hang myself up on a finial notwithstanding, or rot on a mossy rooftop in the visitor of a 3-legged chair, a left shoe smile from ear to ear, and a homeless snail caught in the fell circle of my cunt. 2. And I'm not about to join some silly district of ascetic bicycle tyres that live in colonies on treeptops and, on no-moon nights, are said to rise in flocks to only freewheel, chase each other from horizon to horizon, mate freely, in the minor hours of the morning – there to remain in suspended blitheness until the adjacent no-moon dark. Bunk, if you inquire me, And too, I merely don't see myself up at that place somehow, on a derailed banyan or a grandiose raintree. 3. I certainly don't intend to allow cicadas piss on me, bats shit on me, or a Taccardia Lacca varnish my hide. No way. I would immolate myself and stink up a fine winter morning to warm some shivering bums past the roadside rather than listen to a cricket tuning up his i-inch electric Stradivarius, let lonely a whole orchestra of crickets performing under the stars and indulging itself in pseudo– Wagnerian excesses, God prevent. Certainly non as long as there'southward enough mileage left in me to give a slap-happy boy a skilful run for his coin or enough boys left in the world to give me a good difficult slap on the bottom, followed by another, and so some other in quick succession. I shudder every time I go a whack, simply that's what keeps me going, I guess, what I actually live for. And what I want to know is, when you're my historic period, how many boys will still be running afterwards you lot, Mam?
Lice 56-58
She hasn't been a woman for very long, that girl who looks like a stick of cinnammon. ... She has been talking nonstop, jabbering away similar this and laughing then much all day, because they let him out of jail this morning and her dirty no-practiced lover is dorsum with her once more. [...] 3. Her lover'due south lousy head pillowed on her thighs, has go a harp in her hands. As her fairy fingers run through his pilus, producing arpeggios of lice and harmonics of nits, as bangles softly tinkle over him, he drifts off and dreams that he's holed up in a mossy cave backside a story-telling waterfall booby-trapped with rainbows, and hears the distant bawl of law dogs.
Kerosene 59-65
She has always been the favourite daughter of that grand old banyan tree ...
Knucklebones 66-69
Hand on hip you sit, straightbacked in a torchwood yellow sari, blouse ditto, playing knucklebones with some of your friends
To a Charas Pill 70-71
Trivial devil did you lot grow upwardly on a farm on the shadowy slopes of afar Afghanistan? Did you accept a crude ride in a pickup truck as y'all bounced along in a deject of dust down muletracks and winding dirt roads? Or did you cross the Khyber Pass on a camel'due south back in the company of brigands? ... Get, yous little devil. Coffin him live, coffin the whole lot of them. Like a landslide in the Hindukush can coffin a whole army of ten thou horsemen. And remember. The blessings of my breasts become with you.A street game of tigers and sheep with flowers and stones (cover image of book)
A game of tigers and sheep : p72-73
Who has the tigers and who the sheep never seems to make any deviation. The result is always the same: She wins, I lose. Just sometimes when her tigers are on the rampage, and I've lost half my herd of sheep, help comes from unexpected quarters: Higher up. The rusty shield bearer, neutral till then, para-drops a winning blossom — xanthous and irrelevant — on the checkerboard drawn on the pavement in charcoal, cutting off the retreat of one tiger, and giving a check to the other; and quickly follows it upward with another bloom — simply as yellowish and just as irrelevant — except that it comes down even more than slowly; a bloom without a search warrant that brushes past her earlobe, grazes her cheek, and disappears downwards the front end of her low-cutting blouse — - where she normally keeps her stash of hash — to confuse her even farther, with its mildly narcotic but very distracting fragrance. [note: appeared in Little Magazine Vol 1 : consequence 5 ]
The Barefoot Queen of the Crossroads 74
She is night every bit biting chocolate, the witch of Rampart Row, the barefoot queen of the crossroads. She has dominion over 2 traffic islands and 3 pavements. her title to the island is contested simply by a trespassing sunbeam - just a wedge ... The sunday covers her face up with kisses. Information technology flutters like a hummingbird earlier her navel
Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda eighty
one. The clock displayed outside the Lund & Blockley shop beyond the route is the big daddy of all clocks ... vii. They're serving khima pao at Olympia, dal gosht at Baghdadi, puri bhaji at Kailash Parbat, aab gosht at Sarvi's, kebabs with sprigs of mint at Gulshan-e-Iran, nali-nehari at Noor Mohamadi'south baida gotala at the Oriental, paya soup at Benazir, brun maska at War machine Café, upma at Swagat, shira at Anand Vihar, and fried eggs and salary at Wayside Inn. For, yep, it's breakfast time at Kala Ghoda as elsewhere in and effectually Mumbai - up and downwards the whole hungry longitude, in fact; the 73rd, if I'm not mistaken. fourteen. The tight lid of the colossal aluminium box opens with the commonage sigh of a hundred idlis waiting to exhale followed by a blitz to the exit -- a landslide of fullmoons slithering past each other, to tumble in a jumble, and pile up in a shallow handbasket, an orgy, a palpitating colina of naked idlis slipping and sliding clambering over and suffocating each other. xvi. Each and every hungry and homeless soul within a mile of the footling island is soon gravitating towards it to receive the sacrament of idli, to anoint palates with sambar, to celebrate anew, every morn, the seduction and death of the demon of hunger (threatening the unabridged earth) at the hands of Gauri in the class of a humble idli. They come from all over; walking, running, dancing, limping, stumbling, rolling - each at his own speed. 22. Bowls, katoras, mugs and assorted receptacles come frontwards. Idlis pair off, extricate themselves from the promiscuous heap first change they get, and the moment they find themselves lonely together, lie gasping, belly to belly, or hump each other similar turtles in the mating season – wherever you look, in bowls, mugs, katoras, in plates, on almond leaves. But to exist swamped past tidal waves of sambar. 23. Island of idlis float belly up or splash most in seas of sambhar among the wreckage of red chilli peppers submerged aubergines torpedoed tomatoes peppercorn mines drumsticks drifting like shattered masts Or, similar oil-slick seals, blink in the sun. 27. Male child, am I glad they've left at least this ane tiny traffic island alone; haven't landscaped it to expiry, put a fence around it, and slapped logos all over information technology [...]
Words for a Cellist 114
The music class is over. His fiddler friends have gone their separate means ... ... the cello lying at his feet in its contoured coffin similar a stillborn elephant, with leaves that keep falling like yellowish - and slightly elongated - minims, in a deciduous symphony.
The Shit Sermon 115
1. When the boozer - who has slept through it all and, consequently, missed out on the action besides as his proteins - wakes, he finds himself marooned, all alone, shirtless and hungry, on a tiny deserted island, hugging an empty bottle to his bosom. He puts it away thoughtfully in the space between ii physical blocks, with the vague idea that it may comin in handy to send a message in a bottle to the globe at big - should he so decide at some betoken of fourth dimension in the time to come. ... v. Shit urban center, he thunders; the lion of Bombay thunders, Shit city! I shit on you. You lot were a group of seven shitty islands given in dowry to the Shit King of Ing to shit on -- and now information technology'due south all one big high-rise shit; waiting for God to pull the flush. ...
Watermelons 120-123
All the clocks along the way finish to permit the watermelon cart pass. -- The Boomtown Lepers' Ring 124 Trrap a blast chaka shh chaka boom tap Ladies and gentlemen (crash) here comes (blindside), here comes (boom) here comes the Boomtown Lepers' Band, drumsticks and maracas tied to their hands bandaged in silk and the finest gauze, and clutching tambourines in scaly paws. Traap a boom chaka shh chaka boom tap Whack. Let the urban center see its panthera leo face in the flaky mirror of our flesh. Slap a tambourine (thwack), permit cymbals disharmonism. Come up on, let the coins milk shake rattle and roll in our battered aluminium bowl - equally our noseless singer lets out a half-hearted howl to chugalug out a tuneless song for a city without soul. Here we come (bang) and there we go (boom) pushing the singer in a wheelbarrow. Traap a boom chaka shh chaka boom tap Traap a nail chaka shh chaka nail tap
Bon Appetit 125
I wish bon appetit to the frail old fisherwoman (tiny, she is no more than than merely an armload of bones grown weightless over the years and caught in a internet of wrinkles) who, on her way to the market, has stopped to accept a quick breakfast in a hole-in-the-wall teashop, and is sitting hunched over a plate of chickpeas — her favourite dish — on a shaky table, fierce a piece of bread with her sharp claws to soak it in the sparse gravy flecked with scarlet chilli peppers; and whose rima oris is watering at this very moment, I bet, for I can well-nigh gustatory modality her saliva in my mouth. 2. And I wish bon appetit to that scrawny little motheaten kitten (so famished it can barely stand; stringy tail, baldheaded patch on grungey back, white pare showing through sparse fur) that, having emerged from a small pile of rubbish nearby, and slipped once on a bit of onion skin, has been making its way, and, making its manner slowly but unerringly, towards the shallow basket total of shrimps that the fisherwoman has left on the pavement before entering the teashop, has finally managed to become there, raised itself on its hindlegs, put its muddy paws on the border of the basket, and kissed its beginning shrimp.
A Blind Man Strings a Cot 127
His ropedancing fingers fly diagonally crisscrossing a rectangular void, ... 3. The restless bed tosses and turns in his arms; he wrestles with it. The bed puts its front paws on his shoulders, and all merely starts licking his confront. It stands before him, swaying, like a drunken doorway, daring him to walk through, but he takes information technology in his artillery instead and starts giving information technology dancing lessons. [the ball of rope ] ... plays hopscotch on on the pavement. and a "velvety cat, black plenty to take strayed into daylight straight out of the blind man's blindworld, and which could, of course exist reporting to him, is sitting quietly nether a Toyota parked by the kerbside, on the inside of the correct front bicycle, looking with its golden eyes from under the fender, unblinkingly at the jittery coir ball and its unravelling.
The Potato Peelers 132
Backlit by their dreams, they sit down on three upended wooden crates, outside the archway of a garage converted into a restaurant kitchen; elbows on knees, bare-chested in a higher place their shorts, hunched over potatoes rotating slowly in their hands, and the nighttime side of each one'due south heed faintly visible in the reflected low-cal of the others' unspoken thoughts. ...
The Rat-toxicant Man's Lunch Hr 134
The rat-poisonous substance man has left his one-legged poster leaning against the wall of Wayside Inn and settled down for tiffin on the pavement, [...]
David Sassoon 142
I, who in my mean solar day was known as the merchant prince of Mumbai and lived like a Persian potentate...
Man of the Year 155
Here I stand at this street corner, leaning on the shoulder of a bright red pillar-box at a drunken angle, a foolish grin on my confront, an empty half-pint bottle of rum in my pocket, a cracker up my arse... listening to an quondam Elvis number (Santa Claus is back in boondocks) coming out of a record store. And I experience like dancing in the street -- but I can't. I'1000 incapable of such knee-jerk reactions: they've stuffed me a footling too tight for comfort, I guess, Similar a forked sausage. Head full of cottonwool, sawdust in my gloves and socks, a overfullness of shredded old newspapers. two. Actually, I'g a pretty solid kind of guy. Underneath my faded jeans, export surplus extra large sporty jacket, and a hat straight out of Marlboro country, you'll find that my head is sewn on existent tight. Accept abroad my dashing rainbow-coloured muffler (information technology's from Chor Bazar) and you'll see what I hateful. At that place are thirty stitches round my cervix. Here, you can count them if you wish. three. Information technology'south such a lovely morning in Dec and it feels so skilful just to be alive and standing here, every bit if I had all the time in the earth, and watching the beautiful girls of Bombay go by in a steady stream, to their typewriters, switchboards, computers, as to the impatient arms of their waiting lovers. Just nobody knows better than I that time is one matter I'm running out of fast, and my one regret is going to be this: to leave this world so full of girls I never kissed. Malati, Niloufer, Anjali, Shanta, Alpana, Kalpana, Shirin, Zarine, Sylvia, Maria, Harlene, Yasmin, Nina, Kamala, Mona, Lopa; I love you lot one and all, and wish I could kiss a long goodbye to each of y'all, individually. 4. Inside the pillar-box, new twelvemonth greeting cards are smooching in the permissive dark. I hear them billing and cooing, sighing and moaning, as if there's no tomorrow. They nestle against each other in the cypher gravity of pure love and amore where all laws break down, in the no-man'due south-land between the sender and the receiver, betraying both. One last fling before each goes primly to its rightful receiver, with clean ivory-card conscience. five. I was a pretty unremarkable twelvemonth, all in all; and volition, no doubt, be left out of history books, with no revolutions, wars, genocides, no disasters, natural or otherwise, to remember me past. Zip much happened, except, that the Himalayas rose by some other inch, fewer flamingoes came to Kutch, and the leaning tower of Pisa leaned a little further out by another 1.29 millimeters, the Danube poured two hundred and 3 cubic kilometers of fresh water into the Black Sea, the hole in the ozone layer widened, the earth became poorer by two thousand seven hundred constitute species. I did not resolve any conflicts, or presume to solve whatever of the perennial questions of philosophy. There were no technological breakthroughs, no big leaps; only a lot of hopping around on one foot. No new ideas. A lot of former ones served with a sizzle, with plenty of spice to mask the rotten smell. The good news, on the other hand, is that schoolboys and girls will not take to memorize me. Who got the Nobel for literature? Who the Booker? Who won the loving cup at Wimbledon? And who did Fourth dimension mag pick as the Man of the Year? I have already forgotten. 6. Envoi Every bit paper trumpets blare and toot, as sirens wail and foghorns hoot, and as churchbells toll all around me -- I wish a happy new year to you all. Breathing fire, coughing fume, spitting ash, as firecrackers burst inside my pants -- I wish a happy new year to you all. As all my buttons pop, my chest opens and lungs plummet, as a plume of flame starts eating my hat -- I wish a happy new year to you all. Equally the Rajabai Tower cranes its cervix to see me reduced to a smudge on the route, and bursts into a joyous song -- I wish a happy new year t
Traffic Lights 162
Fifty phantom motorcyclists all in black crash-helmeted outriders faceless behind tinted visors come thundering from one end of the road and go roaring down the other shattering the petrified silence of the night like a delirium of rock-drills preceded by a wailing reddish-top and followed by a faceless president in a deathly white Mercedes coming from the airport and going downtown raising a storm of protest in its wake from angry scraps of paper and dry leaves but unobserved by traffic lights that seem to accept eyes merely for each other and who like ill-starred lovers fated never to meet but condemned to live forever and always in each other'southward sight go on to send signals to each other throughout the nighttime and burn with the cold passion of rubies separated by an empty street. [note: appeared in Niggling Magazine Vol i : issue 5 ]
Reviews
from review by Bruce Male monarch: Kolatkar is a chief of the incongruous and the absurd in reality. Sir Bartle Frere actually existed as a British colonial administrator and was famous in his fourth dimension; there are mountain peaks, fruits, and other memorials in former British colonies. Information technology is typical of Kolatkar to focus on the importation of hunting hounds to show both the British influence on Indian culture and some of it inappropriateness. The classical, Sanskritic, Hindu tradition was piffling improve. On his paternal side the pi-domestic dog claims descent from the canis familiaris in Mahabharata who remains with Yudhishthira long later such warriors as Draupadi, Sahadeva, Nakul, Arjuna, and Bhima 'had fallen by the wayside'. The epic scroll call contrasts with the concrete description of the journey into the Himalayas ('frostbitten and blinded with snow,/ dizzy with hunger and gasping for air') which itself jostles with the decision in which the ballsy 'flying chariot' appears in the same context equally the colloquial 'airlift', 'get on board', and 'made information technology to' : in the shape of a flying chariot to airlift him to heaven. Yudhishthira, the noble toll, refused to get on board unless dogs were allowed. And my ancestor became the only god to take made it to heaven in recorded history. In still some other version of 'man'south devotion to dog', Harlan Ellison's 1969 science fiction short story, 'A Male child and his Dog', which is described equally 'a cultbook among pi-dogs everywhere', the boy sacrifices his dearest, and serves up his girlfriend as dogfood to relieve the life of his starving canine master. The range of literary allusions continues with an explanation of the pi-dog's name, 'Ugh', which, rather than an expression of disgust, is supposed to come up from Sanskrit, 'the U pronounced as in Upanishad'; Ugh is 'short for Ughekalikadu,/ Siddharayya's/ famous dog'. Such literary allusions are supposedly part of the dog's thoughts every bit he meditates in the morn sun surrounded by the concrete highrise buildings of Mumbai knowing that presently the city will awake and he will 'give up the urban center/ to its and then-called masters.' --- from review past Menka Shivdasani Shortly before he died, Kolatkar left backside two major works, published past Ashok Shahane's Pras Prakashan ‚ Kala Ghoda Poems (in English) and Sarpa Satra (in Marathi). Kala Ghoda Poems, though set in Mumbai's fine art district, spans the universe. Its longest sequence, 'Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda,' encompasses a restaurant in Seoul, where a dog is slowly being strangled; a Russian spaceship, where the cosmonauts have just finished their breakfast of pork, cheese, honeycake, prunes and coffee; and Leda, the ninety-year-old who "dreams information technology'south raining bread", and wonders why "she'south the only Jew left‚ and what happened to everybody". Sarpa Satra, on the other paw, is an epic-style poem about genocide, in which the sacrificial fire, still not extinguished, is "blackening the air and filling it with the stench of burning." These books were launched together at a function organized in Bombay this July. Adil Jussawalla was in the audience, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who had come especially from Allahabad, was on stage; both had worked difficult to ensure these books were put together and that people took the time off to exist at that place. I was told by Adil Jussawalla, i of the most respected and defining figures of Bombay's poetry scene in English, that Kolatkar could be found at the Wayside Inn on Th, after half past three. The Wayside Inn was in a neighbourhood chosen Kala Ghoda, which ways 'blackness horse': and then named because of the statue in black stone of Male monarch Edward Seven on his horse that in one case stood at its middle, in the space that'due south long been converted into a car park. Shaped by the colonial past, reshaped by republican and nationalist zeal, Kala Ghoda had go a cosmopolitan 'here and now', located at the confluence of downtown and the arts and commercial districts. Wayside Inn itself disregarded the Jehangir Art Gallery and Max Mueller Bhavan, the centre for German culture; Elphinstone College, the David Sassoon Library, the Regal Movie house, and the Prince of Wales Museum were a brusk distance away; Rhythm Business firm, for a long time Mumbai'southward largest music shop, was next door. The banks and offices of Flora Fountain, one of the city's more venerable business organization districts, weren't far abroad either. In the midst of office-goers, students, nnand people heading towards matinee shows and art exhibitions, were the small families of the homeless who had settled downwards on the pavements around the Jehangir Art Gallery and Rhythm House, the prostitutes who appeared at dark and sometimes loitered most in the afternoon, and the pushers in front end of the Prince of Wales Museum, who, by the late Seventies, had come to stay. ... the Wayside Inn no longer [exists. information technology'southward] been replaced past an upmarket Chinese eatery. Poems of remarkable resonance : Prabhakar Acharya
from The Hindu Kala Ghoda Poems, with a magnificent chain of 31 lyrics collectively called "Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda" at its centre, is a stunning piece of work. The city alive It is as if Jejuri has come up home, to the heart of Mumbai, to the Kala Ghoda area. Kolatkar no longer needs Jejuri'due south Vaghyas and Murlis or its hills and temples to ignite his imagination. The sights and sounds of the city — and the sweepers, peddlers, beggars, lepers, street urchins and others who have it over afterwards its part-going crowd melts away in the evenings — come up to life hither in a way that has never happened in poetry earlier. Parameshwari, the old lavatory attendant, "the Kutchi witch with the leathery face/ and shrivelled dugs"; a immature girl, who "has been talking not-stop, jabbering away" because they have just let her lover out of jail, her happiness, as she busily picks lice from his caput, beautifully evoked: Her lover'southward lousy head, pillowed on her thighs, has go a harp in her hands. As her fairy fingers run through his hair, producing arpeggios of lice and harmonics of nits; the one-eyed ogress, one side of whose face, "burnt possibly/ or melted down with acid... is all scar tissue", but who has e'er been "an auxiliary mother/ semi-official nanny// and baby-bather-in primary/ to a whole chain of children/ born to this street": They are characters bursting with life, their struggle for being zippo curt of heroic. Look at the mode the ogress's happiness and involvement in her called task is described: Requite her a bucket filled with water a chip of soap and an unwashed child — the dirtier the amend — and the wispy half-smile that ever plays on the good side of her face loses its unfinished look Expect at the vivid, evocative description of the bathing itself, and of the boy after the bathing, when the ogress lifts him upwards in the air and sets him downward on solid ground — dripping wet but all in one slice"; and the way he stands, "bow-legged and tottering"; and his defiant attitude to the "whole honking earth/ that has massed its buildings// menacingly around him", as he "points his little/ water cannon/ at the earth in general/... shoots a perfect arc of piss,// lusty/ and luminous/ in the morning dominicus." Has any poet e'er captured life in the raw and so vividly and with such luminous intensity? Lack of space prevents me from writing on "Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda"; or on Sarpa Satra, a powerful narrative poem, in which the legend-spinning skill that delighted united states in the light-hearted "Ajamil and the Tigers" is used brilliantly to produce a dark, ominous parable for our own times, nearly hatred nurtured on memory leading to genocide. Just information technology is time we raise the question of Kolatkar's stature as a poet. The question is complex because he is bilingual. His first book of poems in Marathi, Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita, appeared simultaneously with Jejuri. This has been followed by Chirimiri, the just volume of poems in Marathi to become into a second edition within six months of its publication, Bhijki Vahi, a huge tome of 400 royal pages, and Droan.
bookexcerptise is maintained past a small group of editors. get in touch with us! bookexcerptise [at] gmail [dot] .com. This review by Amit Mukerjee was last updated on : 2015 Apr 02
Source: https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/kolatkar-2004-kala-ghoda-poems.html
0 Response to "Classical Art Classical Art Woman Leaning on Pillar Red Towel on Head Franklin"
Post a Comment