In a blurb for These Were My Homes: Collected Poems, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra describes the late poet Vijay Nambisan’s worldview, as espoused in his poems, as “bleak”. The book gathers together the two collections that Nambisan published during his lifetime along with his newer, unseen poems. As posthumous collections go, we’ll never hear the poet’s perspective, never understand if he considered “bleak” a fair characterisation of his writing.
Gemini I, a two-poet volume featuring the debut poems of Nambisan and Jeet Thayil was published in 1992. Early in Nambisan’s poems in Gemini is one called “The Attic” about a grandmother who dispatches a young child to assess the contents of the home’s attic in order to clear out what’s not valuable anymore. The child returns with a piece of carved wood, and asks, “Isn’t it very pretty? Who made it? / Can I keep it?” She proceeds to send him out to play, having realised that the attic stores a life’s worth of memories for her, and that she must be the one to sift and to keep or to give away. Throughout the collected poems, I was struck by careful, tender moments like these. In “Ducks,” when a niece asks him if the noise they can hear is bullfrogs, he lets her pretend – “yes, or perhaps birds,” – knowing all the while that it is caged ducks on their first night of imprisonment.
‘Your poems have burned away’
Nambisan’s ability to highlight the happier parts of his life is perhaps best observed in a short poem that is amongst his finest. In “Grown Up”, he compares his parents’ bedtime routine of whispering in order to “light / Today’s events to rest,” to the simple “exchange” of “good-nights” he shares with his wife. He knows that in his marriage, “our clay will keep”.
This isn’t to say that a certain scepticism doesn’t dominate his poetry, because for the large part it does. For instance, Nambisan is mistrustful of what language and poetry can be and do. He points that cats “need no language” to carry out their days. He finds god “gone” and “his cave…bare”. He sees the stories of expeditions as ones that have historically exploited local mountaineering guides. He speaks of more estrangements than he ever names friends. The poem “Half-Life” is an acknowledgment of the lingering attachment to a long-ago departure – “Radium decays / a bit at a time, / Your poems have burned away / Line by half-line”. He says pragmatically of love, or perhaps, desire, “When my time comes to be possessed, I know / I shall play my part well, after long study.” Some of his conclusions about the world are both reasonable and snide – observing a dog and her litter, he finds that “Family relationships/ Are not as complicated as they’re made out to be... / It’s doing as you would be done / by / That saps the strength. I do what is expected of me.” As is the case with numerous poets, his writing is part-warning, part-manual for navigating life.
Nambisan published Bihar Is In The Eye of The Beholder, a reflection on the state, in 2001, and a collection of essays, Language As An Ethic in 2005, before returning with a second, longer collection of poems called First Infinities (2015). A playful rhythm appears in his poems in this collection – a humour that takes the edge off his sharper poems to their benefit, and the danger of taking himself too seriously in every poem passes. Addressing his two-decade-long absence from poetry, he writes, “when I’m ninety and young writers ask why I wrote / no more than this / I will answer, “But, you blighters! I kisses took from my misses.” In poems like “Snow,” he takes this new levity further:
“How I’ll roll in the stuff!
Now I’ll tumble and spin!
Until the neighbours cry, Enough!
And send me back in.”
An uneven collection
‘But Nambisan’s experiments with acoustics don’t always pay off. “Bhima in The Forest” is an example where alliteration is prioritised to the poem’s detriment. Lines such as “where is the snake / To spoil me, where is the tiger / To tear me,” simply don’t work as effectively as the lines above because the images they conjure are not as interesting. Nambisan’s strongest imagery is found in his more sombre poems – a description of his grandfather’s wispy beard, of his father’s ghost observing the contents of his ashtray to know whether or not his son has recently smoked, of the futility of cleaning lint, of the “carrion bleaching of our lives,” and more.
The collection is uneven for a number of reasons. In “To K, Who Said A Poem Ended Weakly,” the poet writes about why he ends poems where, and in the way, he does. He says, “So here it is I draw a line/... I knew this much, that this was mine, / And ceased before it should not.” The poem in question is a clever and revealing one, but the criticism (attributed to the K in the poem) holds true for many of the endings to his poems that conclude less successfully than they begin. Additionally, his sentences can be challenging to entangle – I was often unable to detect where one thought ended and the next began. There isn’t an argument to be made that literature always owes the reader clarity, but in this case, obscurity doesn’t appear to serve a purpose. It could easily have been avoided with better punctuation and closer editing. There are also a few poems in the collection that suffer in comparison to the rest – whereas “Ilyushin” and “Meeting a Translator” are concise summaries of specific exchanges that illuminate personalities and undercurrents in a relationship, poems like “Ill Met By Moonlight,” “Poetic License,” and “The Door,” provide the reader with little insight into the people involved.
Towards understading
The publication of Collected Poems is, in a way, an opportunity to reframe the poet’s legacy, to nudge it towards a more nuanced, more accurate understanding. In an obituary for Nambisan, Vivek Narayanan wrote about the “romantic image of Nambisan as a drunk and reclusive writer” as part of “the various myths of personhood we cultivate to cover up our anxieties about reading poetry”. Nambisan is aware of his reputation, referring to it most clearly in “To Have Been Written in Urdu”:
So many people seem to know I like to drink
Whom I should never dream of informing that I was
sober –
Two poems of note, which sit adjacent to one another in the collection, appear to signal to the limitations that being known may bring to one’s creative life, and the small, sometimes suffocating nature of one’s circles. “Elizabeth Oomanchery” mines the acoustics of her name to write a humorous poem about a poet who runs away from her fame only to have her poetry run away from her in turn. “Aswatthama” draws up a critical portrait of an acquaintance “to whom nothing is news / Although he wore his boredom with grace.”
Unsurprisingly, the poems gathered here surpass the image Narayanan refers to. Even the weaker poems have something to reveal about Nambisan and his style – These Were My Homes is a valuable preservation of a portion of anglophone poetry’s history in India.
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