“Somebody must have engineered this loneliness,
some ancestor with a set face tore away perhaps,
and thereafter many of us would be ill at ease, divided.”
Anjum Hasan’s writing sneaks up on you. Her poems float gently on the ripple-less surface of a milieu that most readers will be familiar with - the Great Indian Middle Class. I do not mean to ascribe a homogenous, sanctified identity to her poems. I am not talking simply about those who share common characteristics (like voting for AAP, or muting the television when ads play, or fast forwarding songs). I invoke this identity to suggest the canvas within which her poems uncover meaning, and depth. Inserting herself into this complex psycho-social matrix she asks difficult questions with seeming nonchalance. The poems from her collection Street on the Hill are divided into an ordered whole almost reflecting a bildungsroman - ‘Time of My Childhood’, ‘Families’, ‘Small Town’, ‘Where I Now Live’, ‘A Place like Water’.
They measure the distance between home and the displaced urban sprawl, quietly shedding the skin of the idea of a ‘settled’ individual, or even a settled community. When she speaks about the loneliness of the persona seeking the comfortable invisibilty of a group identity, we are somehow left with the awareness of the loneliness, even of the ‘community’. This is subtle play, where the shadow of a thing is invoked with the longing of language. The small town dissolves into the metropolis thrumming with activity, while, at the same time, this behemoth of the city makes a quiet exit into the interiors of family life and sociality.
The poems unfold with a quaint kind of reflexivity. Her metaphors sit like those bhadralok couples, set in their ways, politely making conversation, and waxing with intellectual flair, but simmering with emotion, judgement, moral complexity and aspiration underneath. Sometimes the poems make a sudden turn in the middle, drawing from the past, or the physical anomaly of an uncanny slant of light on curtains that betrays the ‘yellow(ing)’ of days and childhood dreams. They push the register enough to extend beyond the anecdotal into the philosophical, and you are left there nonplussed thinking of what her words portend. In the middle of a poem called ‘Small Town’ that she interrogates through the character of a man who runs a sports goods store, while the portrait starts to gain focus, the reader encounters this observation:
When a man is killed in the afternoon,
knifed and left to die with his face down
in a drain, the tattooed fellow has an opinion.
The poem than recedes once again into colourful observation, punctuated with uncertainties and quirks that reveal and hide the culturescapes of a type, and a place, simultaneously.
This is a rare quality, this swivelling between sense and insight with ease, this natural lasso of syntax that she throws around several silently beating hearts that seek voice, lost among the throng. She is at once outsider and insider, peripheral and central, distant and intimate.
The poems do not unwrap themselves neatly for the reader to relish and savour, rather, they tease you. They have the quality of those old sepia family photographs that stare you down in dining rooms with kitschy showcases and mantelpieces; photographs that start to acquire meaning without conscious engagement, portraits with eyes that uncloud simply because of the shifting shadows, and the persistence of their presence.
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