Rhythm Streets

In 2017, on reading these lines from Michael Creighton’s ‘New Delhi Love Song’ on the Metro, I allowed myself to feel like a Delhiwallah for the first time ever, after five full years in the city. “People come from everywhere to this city; / all are welcomed with a stare in New Delhi. / The finest things in life don’t come without danger / Eat the street food, if you dare, in New Delhi.” This is a poem that packs in so much that is essential about the Capital, and it spoke to my own complicated feelings about the city. Creighton’s future classic is part of the Delhi section of The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City, a recent anthology edited by Bilal Moin, a poet and economist currently pursuing an MPhil at Oxford University. At just under 1,100 pages (375 poems about 37 Indian cities), it is an ambitious undertaking that encompasses both English-language poetry and works translated from Hindi, Urdu, Tamil et al (over 20 languages overall).

When we think of Indian poets, there are certain poet-city pairings that spring to mind immediately, and these are well-represented in the book—Ghalib and Mir Taqi Mir with Delhi, Agha Shahid Ali with Srinagar, Adil Jussawalla and Dom Moraes with Mumbai. But Moin is also careful to balance these pairings with more asymmetrical approaches to the subject—poets of the diaspora, poets-in-exile, poets visiting as opposed to only inhabiting the cities under purview.

“Putting together a book of poetry about Indian cities, a project like this would be incomplete without the diaspora,” Moin says during an interview. “From a poetic point of view, some of the best poems that I would read in India-centric anthologies would come from people who had migrated a long time ago. And their work carried a sense of nostalgia for India, but also the poignance of exile. Agha Shahid Ali is a great example of this and his last book was even called The Nostalgist’s Map of America.”

Moin includes Ali’s much-anthologised poem ‘I See Kashmir from  New Delhi’. The poem’s famous opening lines are allusive and ominous in their indictment of the power divide between Delhi and Srinagar. “One must wear jeweled ice in dry plains / to will the distant mountains to glass. / The city from where no news can come / is now so visible in its curfewed night / that the worst is precise”. Ali’s influence is also palpable in another very well-crafted poem in the collection, Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee’s ‘A Post Office without a Country’, also about Srinagar (the title refers to Ali’s collection The Country without a Post Office). When Bhattacharjee compares Kashmir to Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s fictional Macondo, “The day was a row of days. The way / it rained in Macondo”, for example, he adds a poignant, mythical dimension to the loss and exile experienced by Kashmiris.

Márquez’s Macondo was a group of villagers that didn’t quite survive the transition into urban prosperity, or if they did survive their souls were never intact again. And many poems here, especially in the book’s second half, speak to precisely

this transition, about the clash of values and cultures that takes place when villagers are forced to move to the city in search of work.

“For me, as an economist, it was always important to describe the journey from the village to the city in holistic terms,” says Moin. “It wasn’t just about the romance or the glamour offered by the big city, it was economic necessity that made people move. So, their poems are about how they deal with that.”

Cities are not just associated with political upheavals and their socio-economic manifestations; often it is as simple as a city being inextricable from a person. In Jeet Thayil’s poem ‘One for Eunice’, for example, he describes the late Eunice de Souza as “Bombay’s almond leaf, impossible to bury”. The poem is part of The City under the City, co-written with the Australian poet John Kinsella. Over two years, Kinsella and Thayil wrote to each other in verse from whichever city they found themselves in, a classic call-and-response technique. The ‘response’ poem can even begin with the concluding lines of the ‘call’—‘One for Eunice’, for example, cites the concluding lines of Kinsella’s poem ‘Newton’s Apple Tree’ which noted that the fabled apple tree was uprooted by “Storm Eunice”.

And therefore, you have Thayil writing these distinctly Bombay lines, full of rage and indignation but also a kind of stubborn love that refuses to let go. “The sky is brown smoke that slides / into my brown skin and eyes. / Live while you can, man. / Visit Mamta at the Harbour Line tracks, / push and pull until she cracks.” As a poet, Thayil’s gaze always ventures beyond the superficial shiny lights of his urban settings, in search of something primal that connects his memories to the cities they are anchored by. Here, too, his voice is that of the ironic city-slicker, a self-aware poet who gleefully inverts the pastoral dreams of his peers. In the poem ‘Them and Us’ he writes, “I missed traffic, lights, people within shouting distance. / In the serene countryside I felt only unease, / furless among the feral, / weaponless under the foreign night.”

Kinsella is the ideal foil for Thayil, providing a gentler counterpart to some of his dispatches. In ‘Cow Town’, Kinsella says, “The rural aspect suited us, even / when we opposed its modus operandi”, a humorous take on trying to build a new life from scratch in an unfamiliar setting. For a collection that’s written in transit, so to speak, The City under the City is especially astute about arrivals and departures. This is why it’s fitting that the book ends with these beautiful lines by Thayil, which sum up the bittersweet moment when you exit one city for good, your head already full of visions of your new life headed in another.  “Leaving a city for good, like leaving a friend, / Is never easy. You’re grieving a friend. // Unnoticed you go, without fanfare, anonymous. / But the street’s alive and hearing: a friend. // Dear handkerchief size park, dear dirty avenue, / High times or low, I didn’t stop believing—A friend.”

The City under the City and The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City are both recommended reading, as in different ways they unpack the intriguing, enriching, often maddening realities of Indian cities.