Vikram Seth
All who you sleep tonight
Penguin India
Time and again, I have been tempted to dismiss love as a fraud played by our senses, where what we are induced to think radically differs from the reality outside our head and at more crass moments I have gone extreme enough to bracket love as gentle madness, who's complete rage isn't unleased till the moment of separation approaches. The phenomenon of love has always bewildered me, fascinated me, and to be honest scared me as well, the abject devotion it pulls from one while never mandating that it be reciprocated as well, the way it justifies pain and anguish as it's byproducts, the way it allows for beautiful lies to lull you into an eternal dimension of false truth, to draw pleasure for some time and then damned to struggle forever alone. But never has someone managed to capture that indifferent anguish, that muted pain, that tormentation of witnessing the change in someone we thought could never change in more better way than Vikram Seth does in above lines.
That's what fascinates me most about Seth's verse, there's a outpouring of grief yet no sentimental outbursts, no terrible accusations but a gentle potrayal of emotions, without the least sense of vindictiveness, that the poet never allows to be forgotten but also embraces, almost accepts them.
In his beautiful and slim book, All those who sleep tonight, Vikram Seth captivates the reader not by shocking and stunning but by gently easing the reader, that apart from the chaos of relations around him, apart from the burden of narrow identities and mundane desires, at the core he's a human, A human not only capable but also deserving of love and wishing to return it, no matter what pain and anguish burning through his chest. This book into five parts or five phrases of human imagination, Romantic residues - the ashes of a fire that rages in each heart and sustains the eternal warmth of nostalgia, In other voices & places - where the poet merges the torments of personal anguish with the universal musings, Quatrains - these four liners where the poet just like a miniature artist captures perfectly and so simply what novelists struggle to do in with hundreds of words, and at the end Meditations of the heart - a section which doesn't need further elucidation.
"We did not deal in words or tears.
At the dead light we did not rage.
What change had crept through our forked years
We did not have the will to gauge."
The remnicese of an old friendship, that silently died without any cry or struggle, which now in some random moment of lonliness, flashes across the mind, as something that was alive once but affects no longer.
As just as poet raises himself above this small portrait of personal memories and just then in next part, the poet takes a broad yet graceful sweep to those who's anguish, love, success and destruction has achieved the magnitude of ages, named or even some condemned to be nameless. From the poetic wailing of Mirza Ghalib to the nameless grim silence of victims of Nagasaki to a patient somewhere unknown in remote corner of world clutching helplessly the hand of his loved one fearing not death but anguish of parting away -
"I leave my sickbed, try to sit an hour or two
To write, to plan, to think - but there's too much to do...
What grief, joy, praise or shame afflict me in this spell
I will find strength to face. Goodbye. May all be well."
And here...
"Stay by my steel ward bed
And hold me where I lie.
Love me when I am dead
And do not let me die."
And to quote another reviewer, "Seth uses the scalpel of his skill as a versifier to keep the anarchy of the unplanned line at bay. No flood of words, images, dreams, Freudian allusions, mythic invocations sweeps over his verse drowning out his particular voice, the voice unburdened by the weight of 'India' that other Indian poets feel bound to bear; scrupulously honest to its well-springs; gently ironic with no trace of a sneer."
True enough, Seth more than a poet acts as an artist of words, a photographer who in the four dimensions of his four liners captures events, emotions and lives impossible to be portrayed in otherwise mere words. But somewhere in between, the poet Seth who maintains quite distance from umbrage of his emotions gives way to the unsuccessful yet passionate lover, a man striving for struggling for withing himself as much with the world for something not noble neither divine but something Truely human - The capacity to love without letting hate or petty vindictiveness, and convert it's unfortunate residues in Art for soothing the hearts of his other fellow travelers. Somewhere he hopelessly remarks -
"Awake for hours and staring at the ceiling
Through the unsettled stillness of the night
He grows possessed of the obsessive feeling
That dawn has come and gone and brought no light"
Here I have not attempted to either interpret or review the work of Vikram which is much above my humble capablities but have with full zeal tried to introduce this poet to you all, A rare human who's capable of loving again even after failing in love, and to immortalise that failure in his poems.
For all those who weep silently at night, head pressed tight on pillows, letting muffled cries to escape from corners, Do not be upset as Seth pleads us all, for in this state of helpless lonliness we all are together, further don't mourn those who left mid-way, cherish their memories of whatever few days spent together and more so cherish them who stayed with you throughout till now.
-- Bhuvan Krishna
13.05.2021
Wow
ReplyDeleteThank you ЁЯШК
DeleteTouchingly immaculate.
ReplyDeleteThank you alot! ЁЯдН
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