Kala Ghoda Poems - Arun Kolatkar

A pack of cards

Yesterday I found a Jack of spades outside Mantri Mall, next to the park in Malleshwaram right beside the metro. I always get a quizzical look when I stop to pick up these little communiqués that the city posts, like clues from a crossword puzzle whose answer is my fate. But you must not believe the city. Finding a queen of hearts with a ‘fauji’ print outside a cafe, does not mean that you will find the love of your life waiting inside, or anywhere in the vicinity, believe me. Still, I like to pick up playing cards, they make good bookmarks at least. Hopkins gave me a word for the soul of a dappled morning revealing itself, like the mirth of spring, if you sit long enough in its presence - inscape. The instress becomes poetry, of course, or music.

I’m thinking today about city streets. About how even a morning that is as perfunctory as Satie’s coy fingers on streets of romance, and nonchalance, is a chequerboard pulse, a breathing cast of sonder. Let me pause for a moment and bring the master in…

This is Pi-Dog, of course, the first poem in one of my all time favourite poetry cycles about a city. Arun kolatkar, lazy midwife who birthed the small gods that curl time and geography into incandescent marionettes, slowly reflecting the city, the dream, and those that it left behind. But his gaze is, again, of the poet on the periphery. Bombay stretches out for him, and he cuddles in her soft navel, along with the others- the leftovers.

Before you join the others at Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda I want to draw attention to the astounding single line from this poem. Everyone who is from Bombay knows that it is a straight line; not a bunch of bangles with concentric glittering circles of neighbourhood, not an amoebic spread caught between an inner and outer ring, not a set of neatly cut chocolate squares with gardens and residential spasms. Bombay is a straight line, an axis on which the people, locals, islands, reclamations, and decadence is plotted, in a chaotic symphony. Now read that longitude of flavourspeak along which Kolatkar maps breakfast.

This is Kolatkar who wrote in two languages and dreamt in a third that nobody really got. This is the artist who spun through time and space, with his pen twirling metaphor like the revolving Sudarshan chakra that could make and unmake entire universes. His impertinence married the city’s coy unfolding with a groundswill of mismatched characters finding union in verse. I am fascinated by his fondness for triplets, his satirical disdain for the rich and the indifferent, his comradeship with the real ragtag bands, the little explosions of sentiment and noir, that he captured with the imaginative voyeurism of a self aware ethnographer, the fantastical excess of a god whose magic was too much for this city, too tender, too magnanimous. He unravelled time itself in the collective sigh of Bombay’s dishevelled offspring, and let out a big, long guffaw, as he sat there. The difference is that he laughed with them, in awe, not at them.

I have read Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems as many times as I have been there, and every time I visit his sensorium of street and stone, I am struck by what a poet can do to a place - how he can turn into a season, a morning breeze quietly wafting unnoticed, yet familiar. This is Bombay for me. This is the city. In all its catastrophic violence its hedonistic snarl its traffic of dream. It remains, an ephemeral ghost forever young in Kolatkar’s verse that is always wet with meaning like dew on paper. There is subtlety, yes, but there is also the drama of Bollywood, and the frenetic activity of the local. Most of all, you can hear the ebb and flow of the sea, frothing at the mouth, quietly watching, as we keep returning to where we started.

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