A Quantum Leap

Lakshmi Kannan reviews Signing in the Air, Poems 

Signing in the Air by Malashri Lal marks a quantum leap from her previous collection of poems Mandalas of Time (2023).  What happens to a writer in the interim period of just two years? What brings about a shift in perspectives, style and mood? Does a writer grow by outgrowing her earlier self? They are some of the intriguing questions when you begin to read Signing in the Air.     

The cover by the acclaimed photographer Robey Lal, enhances the atmosphere of the collection. Even birds in flight would stop for a second to pose for his camera. He can catch a startled squirrel midway on its thieving expedition. 

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The quantum leap can be seen on many levels in this collection – in a different sense of time, a different mood that governs the poems, and most noticeably in the way her language leaps over English to reach Sanskrit, Hindi and Bengali for terms that are closest to the exact nuance of her expressions. This is very much in sync with how Indians write now, in this quarter of the century. They are multicultural and think in multiple languages even when they write in one. Lal is very aware of this as a ‘signpost’ when she refers to it in her Author’s Preface’ as ‘the cosmopolis most readers of English inhabit.’ It is equally commendable that Kiriti Sengupta, the poet-publisher at Hawakal, agreed to her creative design. There are editors who are impervious to this changing climate and continue to be puritanical about language.  

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The Author’s Preface titled “Poetry Resides in Eternity, Not the Body” is crucial for a better understanding of her Weltanschauung that cradles the poems in this book. Aptly subtitled ‘Na Hanyate Hanyamaane Shareere’ in Sanskrit, it alerts us to the ephemeral quality of our lives, its evanescent texture even while we live with all our senses alive to a situation. The title carries this distinctive feature. Many of the poems are washed with farewell hues.  

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She dedicates the collection to her grandmother Jyotirmoyi Mukerji, a teacher, writer and social reformer who she fondly remembers as her ‘erudite, intrepid grandmother, one of the early graduates of Calcutta University’ who chose to live in Rangoon’. The book begins with an Invocation, the Devi Stuti to the Divine Feminine. ‘Ya Devi Sarvabhuteshu…’  appealing to Her to protect the everyday woman from ‘violence, brutality, torture’.

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The five sections Whispers of the Earth, Installations, Echo of Myths, Meditative Missives and Women Who Wander facilitate our understanding of the poems. Yet we soon realize they are not arbitrary sections, for the ‘Five sections are in conversation with each other, in many moods,’ explains the poet in her Preface.

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Contrary pulls of life occur as a recurrent leitmotif in almost all the poems in the five sections. The poet lets them have a full play, giving us luminous glimpses of how we occupy an in-between state of being, of becoming, and of fading. There is a stoic acceptance of mortality, evoked in a striking way in the section Meditative Missives, in the way the parents of the poet continue to hover around her in her life, long after they have left this world. This acceptance has a calming effect that in some ways restores. In the Preface, she states ‘There is both ravage and rejuvenation’ in nature. ‘Here the tangible and the intangible meet’… seeing ‘in the dance of eternity where time is both present and absent’. We got an early sign of it in Mandalas. Who could define it better than the eminent poet-critic Ranjit Hoskote: ‘The dyadic interplay of opposites – the dvanda, in classical terms – forms the ground rhythms.’ (Afterword, Mandalas)

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The section Whispers of the Earth appeals to Kalidas’s Meghdoot, sending prayers from the ‘parched earth below’ (Varsha: Cloud Messengers Today). It has poems in which the poet communes with flowers and birds that fly in the changing seasons. The flowers and bird also ‘talk’ to each other, bringing on a dialogical thread in the narrative which allows for a full play of irony laced with a wry humour. A superb example of this is “Tulip Garden”. Only a fine-tuned poet can hear the hierarchical conversation between the tulips, while the humans who had flocked together could only connect with their phones, prioritizing their Selfies as the most important. The purple tulip asks:

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‘Who brought me here from Amsterdam,

the biting cold and clean winter Sun?’

The yellow tulip answered,

‘Dear cousin, we should explore new soil, air and wind

And hear new languages.’

The vain double tulip knew

It was a winner and preened

“Just watch, I will be the most beautiful.”

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“Yamuna Remembered” laments the loss of a river and ecological damage.

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‘Today bulldozers ravage the river’s cracked bed

displacing people who have built huts instead of boats.’

 

“Rakhee Purnima” is a peach of a poem, complete with the lifting power of its concluding lines:

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‘With generous grace

the Rakhee Moon

cast her celestial wristband

as a Girdle of Protection

knowing that the Earth will

need it soon.’

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Wry humour continues in the section Installations starting with the mouth-watering lines of a delightful poem:

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“Parliament of Birds” is an interesting pastiche of Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem “Parliament of Fowls”. In Lal’s poem, the birds gather on the branches of the Pilkhan tree each evening and chatter about the strange experiences of the day.

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A policeman was stabbed in CP, one said

A woman’s chain was snatched near IIT

A street child was crushed under a speeding BMW…

Would they now debate, discuss, and advice policy measures?

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The section includes a poem based on a news story, a tragic accident that happened on 27 July, 2024.

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This basement library was a sacred altar for

prayers of success in civil service exams

………………….

One day the fury of torrential rain decided to wipe out such inequities.  

………………………

Tanya, Shreya and Nevin found no exit gates.

Three floating bodies were the oblation

That broke the spell of coaching dreams. (Drowned Among Books)

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Two other poems address the urgent issue of senior citizens who spend the last years of their lives in utter loneliness, neglected by their children who they nurtured all through their lives.

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December and itinerant Pravasis lug suitcases

to their childhood homes

Annual rituals of “checking in” on ageing parents

With stacks of medicines. (Pravasi Birds) 

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Echo of Myths is a section which interrogates standard attitudes conditioned by myths. A powerful ode to women who beg on the streets, and who look    

                        

Statuesque and confident/ eyes levelled with the police, reminds the poet of Hidimba (Hidimba on Delhi Streets)

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Ahalya declares she was better off as a Stone before Ram’s feet touched her.

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It’s a better state than inhabiting

a woman’s nubile body

trapped in marriage

to a shrivelled ascetic.   (Ahalya)

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Meditative Missives has a touching poem on her father who left the world three decades ago, but even now he awaits my arrival/ in the enchanted realm of Jaipur.  (Baba at the airport). She sees him behind the Mohenjo-Daro sculptures:

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‘I saw an intense scholar’s face…

my father, the historian

whom friends called the ‘walking encyclopedia.’ (Museum Shadows)

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He appears again, this time with her mother ‘A touch, no words. Silence.’ (Parenting). They have left their imprint on their home named “Shyamoli”, named for ‘evening shadows’, which still echoes a conversation.

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Maybe they haven’t found

another home as yet

or maybe, this cottage “Shyamoli”

is their permanent pratishthan (Speaking Portraits).

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She recalls her beautiful mother again in “Ma at Shyamoli’s Door”. Finally, this is what makes a house an ancestral home, an aura that is everlasting.  

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In the section Women Who Wander we see Lal effortlessly fusing the eternal dilemma of the evolving woman, like her exemplary grandmother who believed in adapting to modernity/while respecting her ancestry, emblematic in her blouse styled in delicate white lace,

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I’ve saved my grandma’s Victorian blouse

for its beauty and modesty (Grandma’s Blouse).

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The poem on Vinesh Phogat, seething with a moral indignation, recalls how a nation witnessed

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Another Indian woman battered by patriarchy (Gold Dust)

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“Women on Kawariyatra” and “The Little One in Pigtails” are one of the many others that have a feminist edge in perspective.  

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Signing in the Air is a collection of reflective poems that lives in another realm. It will take her further to levels that she would explore, discover and share with readers in the poems that she would write, or perhaps writing now.  Who says a book ‘ends’ with the last poem within the covers? A book just begins another ‘book of life’. One looks forward to travelling with her on this journey of life with her next book.

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Signing in the Air takes us to people who belong, who are rooted in their faith, in the rituals, the festivities that mark the calendar to the to the agrarian cycles of seasons, the real Ritus that pull us within their vortex. One wishes to see this book in the libraries of schools and colleges. Young students need to know who they are in the social and cultural context of their land. They would be larger for the knowledge of their lineage.