From the stomach of whales

'The way words are used is a running leitmotif in this collection', says the author

In her essay, “No straight thing was ever made”, poet Urvashi Bahuguna writes: “In 2014, when I move to Mumbai to work… I feel incredibly let down [by my family]. …Why did other people’s parents call every day? I am too upset to admit I would have hated daily calls.” As the reader learns, Bahuguna was dealing with mental health issues at that time. She writes: “…in 2015, I make a breakthrough in my mental health journey. An unhappy relationship dissolves. I find a young, hilarious therapist in Mumbai. I pierce my nose (something my ex expressly discouraged me from doing.) I get a tattoo…”

The fourth part of her debut collection, Terrarium, which won the 2017 Emerging Poets Prize of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, begins with a poem set in Mumbai, “Bombay Train and Bombay Boys”. “In this city, boys alight from trains like / birds — seamlessly from stillness to speed. / This is their inheritance: to be creatures / of flight.” The prepubescent boys are allowed to travel in the train compartment reserved for women: they “sell jasmine / in the ladies special at 7.07 pm.” The poem is only 10 lines long, shorter than most others in the collection. Though the text has no clues about who the narrator or observer is, one might imagine a traveller in the “ladies special”, on her way to work, lonely.

At least another poem in the section is set in Mumbai — “Marrow: A Love Story”. It is, as its title suggests, a love poem, a sort of monologue by one lover to her partner — but there is a difference of language between them: “We don’t speak the same / language at home, can I teach you / the word for peanuts staining newspaper / cones? Repeat after me: the moong-fa-li, / the moong-fa-li word.” Sharing moongfali (peanuts), a common enough activity for couples hanging out at Nariman Point, becomes symbolic of familiarity. The lover asks for permission: “Can I teach you?” But, she also makes herself vulnerable, invites the beloved into her world.

Terrarium book cover

The way words are used is a running leitmotif in this collection. In “Seeking A Well-Spoken Gallery Assistant”, the narrator finds even familiar words alien, because of the way they are pronounced: “When I first moved to the city, I said / the word fragment with a wide-eyed aye. / My classmate cringed & corrected: / not fray like hem coming apart but fraa / like a small town exhaled from the mouth.” To learn a particular accent is implicating oneself into a target society, but it is also a sort of performance, which perhaps changes one irrevocably. Towards the end of the poem, as the narrator gets a job as a gallery assistant, she goes home feeling good about it, and about having learnt the language, which is also social currency: “how fancy: fa like a fat prized hen, cy / like wash that damn mouth out with sea.”

The sea is a constant presence in Bahuguna’s poems — perhaps because she grew up in Goa. An early poem in the book, “Migrating to Goa”, is about a family with two girls — like Bahuguna’s — moving from Gujarat to Goa. “When we arrived, a kind colleague took us boating. / …I repeat my mother’s words / …a good place / for a holiday, but not to live.” In a recent interview, Bahuguna claimed that Goa, especially the monsoon, made her more aware of the natural world: “It may seem counter-intuitive, but the monsoon made the natural world unavoidable — tiny creatures would be in my house taking shelter from the rain, the greens of plants and trees became more vivid.” 

It is perhaps this experience that has made her more sensitive to ecological developments — a characteristic her poetry shares with that of her friend and poet Sohini Basak. In a stunning poem, “The Pilot Whales Speak”, she imagines an internal monologue of beached whales between Kallamozhi and Manapad in Tamil Nadu: “We are surprised when they open / and find — a length of plastic like / a river swimming within us.” Discussing this book with me, another young poet recently told me that he had never thought of ecology being a subject for poetry. Bahuguna’s book makes an urgent appeal to make it one.

The writer’s book of poems, Visceral Metropolis, was published in 2017 and his novel, Ritual, is forthcoming this year