Poem

Short Commentary

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The great Indian house, stationary, offering shelter to its inhabitants, was no less than a monster said the poet.

With its welcoming smile and thousand arms it ushered the foreigners to come and stay and to become one with its culture – resistance withered itself away gradually. The time of Rajas, Shahanshahs, travellers, envoys, merchant kings, queens all lived and looted and loved this great Indian house.

This monster’s burning red eyes never blinked said the poet, not even when its inhabitants, its children set each other on fire. It swallowed these deaths, warmly, and sang lost songs.

Who met this monster once couldn’t leave, those who left, came back, every single time, as matter or chatter.

The monster – and so maybe for the want of a better word – fits and breaks the spectrum simultaneously, it is a monster but not evil or kind, not entirely, said the poet.

Reminiscing, hating and loving it, the poet’s poem tells that the great Indian house, with all its filthy incongruities and slow, glossy loveliness, is alive, apparently stationary, yet on the move, grappling impalpably with every idea and action that it warmly, blindly has gathered, is gathering.

The great Indian house when hit by a tempestuous storm, though handling it eventually, even now follows the tradition of first welcoming and serving it hot tea.

A modernist bilingual poet, linguist, essayist, folklorist, philologist, translator and scholar, A. K Ramanujan ‘wrote of the home left behind with a remote passion and irony’. Born in Mysore, Ramanujan moved to the US in the 1960s; settled there, he would remark to friends that he was the hyphen between Indo-American.

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His translation of the Kannada novel Samskara and a Tamil bhakti poetry, Speaking of Siva, into English and the essays like ‘Who needs folklore?’ and ‘Is there an Indian way of thinking?’ allowed the readers to see regional literature in a new light.

The following poem, that inspired this blog post, appeared in Ramanujan’s second collection of poems titled ‘Relations‘ in 1971.

Small-scale Reflections on a Great House

by

A K Ramanujan

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Sometimes I think that nothing

that ever comes into this house

goes out. Things that come in everyday

to lose themselves among other things

lost long ago among

other things lost long ago;

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lame wandering cows from nowhere

have been known to be tethered,

given a name, encouraged

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to get pregnant in the broad daylight

of the street under the elders’

supervision, the girls hiding

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behind windows with holes in them.

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Unread library books

usually mature in two weeks

and begin to lay a row

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of little eggs in the ledgers

for fines, as silverfish

in the old man’s office room

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breed dynasties among long legal words

in the succulence

of Victorian parchment.

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Neighbours’ dishes brought up

with the greasy sweets they made

all night the day before yesterday

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for the wedding anniversary of a god,

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never leave the house they enter,

like the servants, the phonographs,

the epilepsies in the blood,

sons-in-law who quite forget

their mothers, but stay to check

accounts or teach arithmetic to nieces,

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or the women who come as wives

from houses open on one side

to rising suns, on another

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to the setting, accustomed

to wait and to yield to monsoons

in the mountains’ calendar

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beating through the hanging banana leaves

And also anything that goes out

will come back, processed and often

with long bills attached,

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like the hooped bales of cotton

shipped off to invisible Manchesters

and brought back milled and folded

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for a price, cloth for our days’

middle-class loins, and muslin

for our richer nights. Letters mailed

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have a way of finding their way back

with many re-directions to wrong

addresses and red ink-marks

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earned in Tiruvalla and Sialkot.

And ideas behave like rumours,

once casually mentioned somewhere

they come back to the door as prodigies

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born to prodigal fathers, with eyes

that vaguely look like our own,

like what Uncle said the other day:

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that every Plotinus we read

is what some Alexander looted

between the malarial rivers.

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A beggar once came with a violin

to croak out a prostitute song

that our voiceless cook sang

all the time in our backyard.

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Nothing stays out: daughters

get married to short-lived idiots;

sons who run away come back

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in grand children who recite Sanskrit

to approving old men, or bring

betel nuts for visiting uncles

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who keep them gaping with

anecdotes of unseen fathers,

or to bring Ganges water

in a copper pot

for the last of the dying

ancestors’ rattle in the throat.

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And though many times from everywhere,

recently only twice:

once in nineteen-forty-three

from as far as the Sahara,

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half -gnawed by desert foxes,

and lately from somewhere

in the north, a nephew with stripes

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on his shoulder was called

an incident on the border

and was brought back in plane

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and train and military truck

even before the telegrams reached,

on a perfectly good

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Chatty afternoon.

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