‘Treasurer of Piggy Banks’: The cosmic and the planetary in Vinod Kumar Shukla’s poetry

When readers talk about Vinod Kumar Shukla’s prose, they mention its poetic character. Even the titles of his novels, A Window Lived in the Wall, or Windows in Our House Are Little Doors, sound like titles of poetry books. Shukla thinks and writes poetically. He is also a poet. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s translation of Shukla’s poems in a new collection, Treasurer of Piggy Banks, marks an important moment in Hindi, Indian and world poetry.

As a poet, Shukla has no parallel in the language in which he writes, Hindi, not in terms of the conventional yardstick of his status as a poet, but as someone whose style is inimitable. Shukla’s poetry speaks to us from a corner within us we rediscover while reading him. Shukla has not moved, not moved away, not moved far away from, the place where he ingrained the sensibility of language and imagination. For Shukla, language and imagination are quintessentially a place, a locality, where the everyday is most deeply experienced. Shukla is not necessarily happy, or at ease with that place, but it is where he finds a window that helps him probe into the depths of the paradox between alienation and memory. Shukla circles around, returns to, this paradox in poem after poem. Sometimes this paradox is not apparent, but you can feel its presence in the language.

A cosmic connection

In an undated poem that begins the collection, “A Poem Lived First in the Novel”, Shukla describes a metaphoric appearance of the lyric, as lover or beloved, in the form of a poem. It was the birth of a star from the horizon of innumerable stars where your eyes get fixed, where you recognise yourself as one and lonely. “It stood apart. For a while, the first.” The star held the stargazer to attention. The poet felt a cosmic connection that transformed into the poetic. The poetic is cosmic. Lyric poetry is precisely the birth of this discovery which is a relation of the self with the world. It can also reveal connections with other poets.

Reading through the collection I was reminded of the modern Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos. In Ritsos’ short poems, he often measures solitude in relation to the animate and inanimate, to both beings and things, something we find in Shukla. In a poem “Conclusion”, Ritsos writes, “This window is alone. / This star is alone, / like a cigarette forgotten on the table – smoking, smoking in the blue, alone.” It frames the state of loneliness photographically, revealing an immediate, even intimate world of objects that are singular in their existence. In the second stanza of Ritsos’ poem, he writes: “And I’m alone, he said. / I light my cigarette, I smoke. / I smoke and meditate. I am not alone.” Thinking, and the act of writing, is a way to overcome the alienation of being. The window and the cigarette are objects that serve as metaphors for being in the world. By connecting them you invent language. You no longer remain the passive object among things. The proof of being lies in its awareness. That is why, in another poem, Ritsos writes, “… the horse on the mountain was more alone than / the star”. The horse is more alone because, unlike the star, it is aware of being alone. Being is lonelier than things.

In the first poem from his first collection Almost Jai Hind (1971), Shukla raises a question which is both personal and historical. Leaving your dwelling, your place of belonging makes you an intruder, an infiltrator in other parts. This is another circle of alienation that has pursued migrants throughout history. Today, it is a deeply political matter. When I was eight years old, I learnt I was a foreigner in my place of birth. I thought it was ridiculous, but the ridiculous was more real than reality. When politics names you an outsider, you have to prove your belonging. You slowly realise, that proving it legally is not enough. Something of you will always remain a foreigner.

The weight of life

“Infiltrator or inhabitant?” Shukla asks. The very asking of the question proves you are split into two, someone who thinks he belongs by the law of natural rights but is denied that status and is considered an infiltrator to someone’s ethnic and cultural property. Written in 1968, the poem is close to the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971, when thousands fled the country to take asylum in India. Shukla faces the predicament of seeing his identity, his being in the world, being put into question. What does the poet do? He must hide. He will try to be someone else in his photograph, in his choice of vegetables at the marketplace, so that he is not taken for who he is, but who he has invented to represent himself. The poet must belong by hiding himself in order to belong, to become local, to become the same and not be identified as other. The poem ends with the startling psychological image of the poet being aware of how his back appears when he leaves, of the glances falling on him behind his back, giving him the impression that in the place where he is considered an infiltrator, the wishful and accusative glances of local people will never pay attention to his arrival but his departure. Shukla will never arrive where he belongs, remaining other despite his efforts to be the same.

In the poem with the famous opening line, “That man put on a new woollen coat and went away like a thought” (1964), Shukla explores the image of a person lost in the winter mist. He resembles the tree he is standing under. In the eyes of the horse-keeper, he even resembles the lone horse “of inferior stock” standing next to him. The mist dissolves your identity. Appearances are truly deceptive when there is a lack of visibility. In another small poem written in 1960, the poet imagines being a ten rupee note in the bag of another shopper, rather than being “stuck” as a note in his own bag. Shukla is weary of the material burden of existence and wishes to escape it. When others bear you along, your being is lightened. To carry the weight of one’s own life and needs can sometimes be debilitating.

In another poem written in 1966, we encounter one of Shukla’s abiding tropes on the natural state of alienation suffered by city folks. In a park, the poet finds trees lined up like troops. The barbed wires are an affront to the experience of nature. Shukla radically shifts the symbolic meaning of the fence: “No tree should escape, / or is there a fear that someone might approach them?”. The public park, with its security guards, “is a prisoner-of-war camp / or a devastated territory / that we occupy”. The tree, like the migrant, the “infiltrator” in the previous poem, also occupies a paranoic, endangered existence in the city. Trees are caught in the security web that orders and controls life. Shukla discovers trees, like people, alienated from within. Their lives are managed by an apparatus that commits antinatural violence upon them. There is a poetic affinity with Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym, the nature poet Alberto Caeiro. In a poem from the collection, The Keeper of Sheep, Caeiro writes: “Poor flowers in the flower beds of manicured gardens. / They look like they’re afraid of the police…” The modern mechanism of power has unleashed an existential paranoia where nature resembles the psychic condition of human life. By interrupting our natural sense of wonder about nature, the heavily policed architectural sites of modern life have ruined the state of our being in the world.

In the collection That Man Put on a New Woollen Coat and Went Away Like a Thought (1981), there is a poem where Shukla dreams of turning into a tree and feeling the rain the way a tree does, where a bird can make a nest and lay eggs. Is it a dream of becoming more nature, torn by the paradoxes of human nature, or is it an intense longing of the tree in memory, to turn into the memory of a tree left behind when he left home? Is it a poem on the lack of nature, or the loss of nature? There is a play between nature and memory in Shukla’s poems, where memory marks the loss of nature. This is a problem for Caeiro: “Remembrance is a betrayal of Nature, / Because yesterday’s Nature isn’t Nature. / What was is nothing, and to remember is not to see.” Caeiro finds the cognitive, a loss of the sensuous. Nature, for Caeiro, lies in the purely sensuous realm of being. Shukla may not disagree with Caeiro.

In another poem written in 1978, he is trying to remember if he saw a flower in the bush that he can’t see now. He wonders about seeing the flower earlier, which appeared to be a flower even from a distance. The striving to remember makes him aware of how much he forgets. The memory of a flower in the bush matters to him. It speaks of his ties with the earth. Shukla is intimately connected to nature, and forgetting a small detail in nature is enough to make him worry about memory.

In a poem from 1976, Shukla intensifies the nature of the problem, the problem of nature that afflicts a poet living in the city who is alienated from it. The poem begins: “A city person, / I was strangely disoriented / in the midst of nature.” When he stands in the bus queue, he feels a tree has also joined them. When the bus arrives, the poet waits for the tree to get in before him. He realises, being “an educated man” that “trees / do not board buses”. The startling irony of education is that it leads you to (rationally) recover and distance yourself from the realisation of alienation. In an autobiographical story by Kenzaburo Oē in World Literature Today I had read decades ago in the JNU library, he describes how as a little boy travelling from his village to Tokyo to study for higher education, he was carrying a small gift from his mother. The conductor demanded to see the packet he was carrying. It turned out to be a sapling his mother gave him as a way to remember the village. The people on the bus laughed. Only little Oē understood its significance. In his Nobel lecture in 1994, Oē mentions, only after reading Huckleberry Finn, “I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.”

Shukla writes, “And I who am a city dweller, / was separated from nature / in such a way that leaving the tree behind / I took my seat on the bus.” The poet’s imagining of a tree in the queue emerges from the anguish of alienation. He left the trees behind when he left a place close to nature to live in the city. The trees are chasing him. The memory tree is superimposed on the roadside tree. “In my room I’ve hung a picture / of a whole forest.” In a city, the forest transforms into artifice, into art, mirroring alienation. A forest is hung on a wall, like a relic from another life.

Moving in time

In Everything to be Done Will Remain to Be Done (1992), there are poems where Shukla describes the geological time of life. In the poem, “From a Great Distance You Should See Your Home”, Shukla discovers the vast canvas of telescopic time allows you to see beyond the scale of worries you encounter in microscopic time and broadens your perspective. The poems in this collection are about moving in time, often across geological time. A poem begins: “It’s by going that you’ll meet the others / it’s by going that you’ll arrive on the other shore… It’s by going that you’ll leave behind what’s behind you / It’s by going that what lies ahead will remain.” Movement produces parallax. To move is to be forever leaving and arriving, never quite leaving or arriving, but in order to leave and to arrive, one must start the journey, begin to move. There is nothing to achieve in movement except the fact of moving.

Shukla turns the gaze around in a poem which goes: “Do birds sitting on the ground / feel that they’ve left the earth and are flying above it / when they climb the air? ...And when they return / and sit on trees, / do birds feel / that it’s the earth they’re sitting on?” This takes us to Heidegger’s reading (and more recently, Agamben’s) of the eighth elegy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where Rilke writes, “the open, in which every being is freed… is being itself.” Rilke suggests the animal sees “the open” more openly, than human beings whose (limited) gaze turns back on itself. Shukla suggests that since birds belong to both earth and sky, they don’t measure one against the other, or measure their own being at rest or in flight in relation to either. For birds, the space between the earth and the sky is continuous. Birds live in another time, for they inhabit another space. “I don’t have wings”, writes Shukla. When we use the expression, ‘time flies’, we mean time flies independent of us, while we are rooted to the ground. When we say, flights of imagination, we use a metaphor to describe a mental phenomenon. Birds live the metaphor we imagine. Birds are pure imagination. We seek the pure imagination of birds, but we can only imagine within the alienating traps of human spaces.

In After Then Comes Now (2012) Shukla evokes the figure of the adivasi. In the last stanza of a poem he writes, “O adivasis! The tree did not desert you, / nor did you leave the forest on your own. / I saw groups of you walking down city streets this year, /bedraggled children in tow, forest people without forests.” The being of adivasis is historically one with the forest. It is not enough to say, adivasis live in the forest, they are part of forest life. Rather, the adivasi is the forest. When they are torn from the forest in the search for livelihood, roaming the cities like intruders, they are bereft of being, since their being is part of being forest.

In another poem from the collection, Shukla returns to the theme of trees and the city: “When I think of forests / from the city, I could be killing / forests with a thought. / if not in the forest, where will forests be? / They’ll be among city trees.” Just like the poet himself, or the adivasi, the forest tree is equally lost and alienated in the city. The tree’s proper place is in the forest. The city tree is tree uprooted from its home. There is an interesting story that the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami tells Professor Jamshed Akrami in an interview in Ireland (A Walk with Kiarostami, 2001). A girl’s father took her to the forest. After they reached the place, the father asked her daughter if she could see the forest. The girl replied, “Yes, but there are so many trees that I can hardly see the forest”. The city girl faced a conceptual problem with the word forest. For her, the trees did not make the forest. She was looking for something conceptually distinct. In her innocence, the girl conveyed the roots of alienation.

Treasurer of Piggy Banks is a book of poetry that is meant to be read and gifted to poetry lovers. Vinod Kumar Shukla is a poet who speaks most intimately to us from a far-off place within us we can revisit reading him. He tells us of the forest in us we have lost to the alienating charms of the city. I want to buy 500 copies of this book and sit somewhere in Connaught Place and gift it to those among the passersby who are even hesitatingly interested or curious.

Mehrotra’s translations are fluent and innovative. He often makes the idiom more distinct in English, the mark of an attentive translator. I have a small issue with his use of conjunctions that tends to make certain lines prosaic and halt the flow a bit. If you reread these lines without the “but” you will see what I mean: “Defeated, the man sat down. / I did not know the man / but I knew defeat…. He did not know me / but he knew my extended hand… we did not know each other / but we knew travelling together.”

Coda:

I take the liberty (with permission from the editor) to add my translation of a poem that is not included in this collection, but remains a favourite Shukla poem:

Each time I speak, I speak less and less
speak sometimes, mostly keep silent
so less on some days
I speak one thing over and over again like a cuckoo’s persistent cooing 
then silent

Let my utmost silence be known to all
the silence of all that is unsaid, all that has been said
against the mountain, the sky, the sun and the moon
a small, twinkling,
even my timeless little silence

In the hush of ambushing the wrong
after giving it a blow my one silence – 
before it goes off
the silence of a gun

And the gun that never went off the silence of such peacefulness 
of my eternal hope

Beneath the huge solitude of a banyan
the safely kept
silence of the burning lamp

In the din of the crowd
my silence, saved from being trampled, the silence of whether I should speak
in my people’s marches
or should I carefully keep from speaking

Treasurer of Piggy Banks, Vinod Kumar Shukla, translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Westland.