NILEEN PUTATUNDA – BEGGAR – WRITERS’ WORKSHOP – KOLKATA –
2013
A collection of sixty-nine very small poems. They are most
of them like haikus more than stories. A small cameo vignette with very few
words, and nothing but a precise sketchy description of a situation. There is
no vast vision, no lyrical, epic or not, taking off into some distant and
limitless sky.
The only opening of this poetic
world is on some references to Hinduism and Sufism. These allusions are most of
the time to poets and masters in education or personal life and meditation. No
real supernatural poetry in all that. Not even surreal. The references to Krishna and Kali are limited and do not really create a surrealistic
atmosphere or universe.
Some simple dimensions appear
rather clearly. The omnipresent and overpowering concept of the mother attached
to Kali as a symbol of love, though Kali is not exactly the loving friend you may
want to have. This motherly side of Kali is identified as Ma, in fact Kali Ma,
and attached now and then to Ganga , the river
flowing by. This Ma is supposed to inspire in the speaking character in these
poems some kind of rejection of lust (essentially), anger and greed. Pride is
added once in that trilogy when it is slightly reshuffled by some beggar.
This Ma is supposed to inspire
empathy for beggars (meaning people who have more or less chosen to be beggars,
ascetics and meditators in the street) and for menial manual workers like
essentially again rickshaw pullers. The character in these poems has a real
fixation on rickshaw pullers to the point of comparing himself to one of them
since he is pulling on his lust all the time. I guess the character in the
poems does not realize that this makes rickshaw pulling a punishment for some
immoral lust or life, a punishment thus imposed onto the rickshaw pullers.
This idea of a punishment for one’s
lust is ever present though that lust is not defined. To fight against that
lust the character in the poems invoke Ma, the motherly Mother of the Universe,
Kali Ma who is supposed to bring the darkness of peace and quietness, of the pacifying
and smoothing of this disruptive lust. And yet the character in the poems is
only considering men around him, no females, no attraction from females or for
females, but all kinds of empathetic attraction from beggars and simple menial
manual workers and for the same. That is the most surprising element. The only
real feminine character is Kali Ma, who by the way can be either man or woman
like all Hindu gods.
This male anti-lust fixation is
bothering after a while because we wonder what or who the character’s lust is
for? For a beggar who is going to keep his two rupees as the souvenir of some
nice eye contact? For a younger beggar who asked for the possibility to sleep
under the staircase of the character’s home, a favor that is refused because
the character does not own the house where he lives? Or the rickshaw puller –
or any other man in the street – who makes eye contact with the character or
with whom the character makes eye contact?
In other words this empathetic
slightly esoteric and spiritual poetry is disincarnate, lacks the reality of
flesh and blood, passion and love, real love, not for a man dead for decades or
centuries, not love for some distant old famous male that has no real existence
at all in the poems, but love for a real person, be they man or woman does not
matter because love has nothing to do, or so little, with lust. But the effort
of purging his lust makes the character in the poem loveless, unloved and
unable to love really beyond evanescent and transient eye-contact.
We wonder if there is a father
figure somewhere, or simply a father of flesh and blood. And the only mention
of such a father is that beyond heaven there sits, stands, resides THE father
who is thus a godlike figure beyond any reaching procedure, except by dying in
order to enter heaven and go beyond, and with no mental and spiritual density
and reality. The disincarnation of the love of this character in the poems is the
result of the absence of such a real father figure that is compensated with
dead, distant and inexistent in direct real life role models.
Even the only poem about
Al-Qaeda, the Talibans and such real political and social problems is through a
dead man and his posthumous book about that terror and these terrorist organizations,
with no details of course.
So we just end up following the
character in the poems and abandoning our safety and sanity to the care of Ma:
“Sleep
You call so
sweetly,
Last night
when you called,
I cruelly
turned you away,
And I suffered
all of today,
Now I can’t
wait
To hold your
hand
And Meet Ma
Who will nurse
This weary
mind and body,
Perhaps even
show
Some magic
from realms unknown,
And send me to
another day
In the school
of life.”
The least we can and must say is
that this sleep encounter is disincarnate in all possible ways, and motherly to
the point of sounding regressive.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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