2 'love' poems: Let me be Adjective | Vigil

Arundhati Subramaniam

There was a moment when I was reading the poems in Arundhathi Subramaniam’s ‘Love without a Story’, when I stopped reading, did a double take at the line I had just read, and then said aloud “Kya Baat hain”. The line comes in the second half of a poem about a journey to the ‘shrine’ at Ajmer (the dargah) that involves ‘sixteen Pakistanis, one Indian’:

‘our disguises are just a bit
askew

bodies more provisional,
stories less italicised,
breath more rationed,
certainties more unlaced’

She is speaking about this “mortal coil” as a disguise. This metaphor is cast so lightly, that it doesn’t betray the firmament of mystical insight behind it. This is at the centre of what makes her poems interesting for me. Her words have multiple faces, and while she is writing about one thing, she is also writing about another (and another), sometimes its complete opposite! That she is a master of run-on lines and precision is a no-brainer. Her poetry also embraces ambiguity and double meaning with ease. She talks about the self with unabashed distance, without compromising on feeling or the reality of the subject matter. This points to the tradition that the poet draws from and subverts - the Bhakti tradition.

I see many of her poems as love poems that are able to hold uncertainties much ploughed by ‘love poets’ through the ages. But her language holds these with quiet certainty, and also, mind you, a spirit of dissent. What she does is create space, allow contrasting and sometimes ironic elements to co-exist, and often before you know it she has gotten under the skin of our own questions about the self and the world. That, I believe, is the real triumph. It is what made me learn from these poems, and prompted me to reshare her work.

Every poetic section, then, is both a journey inward, and a journey outward. Every phrase or metaphor is a pun on the present, “disguised”, but crafted to undress, layer by slow layer. I am sharing two of her love poems that explore this impulse, one from ‘Love without a story’ and the other from ‘Confronting Love’ (the anthology she edited with Jerry Pinto).