Mallika Bhaumik’s third collection of poems, When Times is a Magic Jar, has memory and a lost past as major motifs in her evocative verses. For she is able to make time melt in the palm, shrink it to a dot, make it fluid so she can both dream and “rush back to chase the fireflies”. At its most primal, the past is about the tall, lean frame of a mother waiting to take her ten-year-old daughter home, the child prattling on, as they walk home together in the rain under a blue umbrella. Life right now is more difficult. For it is not only about the mother’s breathlessness, a dim retina and painful limbs but how these fragile years press upon the narrator, metaphorized by a tour site she plans to visit where a tree forces its way through a ruined temple roof. At the end, everything blurs.

A nominee for the Pushcart Prize for Poetry in 2019, Mallika Bhaumik’s poetry, short stories, essays, articles, travelogues and interviews have been published in various journals and anthologies, the latest being her non-fiction essay in Our Stories, Our Struggle: Violence and the Lives of Women. Bhaumik received the Reuel International Prize for her debut poetry collection, Echoes (Authorspress, 2017). Her second collection is titled How Not to Remember (Hawakal, 2019). Her poems are part of the post-graduate syllabus of the English department of the BBMK University, Dhanbad.

Un-worded stories

The title poem also suggests the essence of the book: “un-worded stories”, a magic-filled jar when vivid images of childhood “return to your eyes / with the luminosity of the Northern lights”. The poems are shot through with nostalgia for the simpler life of childhood in emotions of longing for, in the current reality, “a spider spins a silken web of chaos around me.” In the poem, “Postcard”, we see the past as potential: While watering her potted mogra flowers, the narrator observes: “they soak up and grow thick with promise – the way I used to be”. The past is not free of tragedy, a tragedy that works its way into the present, making “Jump” one of the most striking poems. A timid cousin falls off a sprawling terrace in an ancestral home. Only the terrace corner and the narrator know why he jumped. Later, there is this deliberate stepping off from a lonely balcony of a swanky high-rise apartment. Emptiness is hinted at in the sudden disappearance “from your wine glass”. As before, the reasons will not be known. Anything can stir up memory with images “speaking a language that paints / the canvas of early days”: leaving a house; watching raindrops hang from leaves in the verandah; the veins on the hands of an old maid grinding cummin on a stone.

Memories are closely interwoven with dreams, dreams of love and longing for a fulfilment that never comes. For dreams are bubbles when two people can walk the same road that never meet. The poem, “Gift,” is rich with a wish list of unborn words that might form an island “where our names rest / until the roots run deep, / deep enough to reach the complexity of my dreams”. While the poem wishes to gift wrap many things, its most urgent wish is the gift of freedom “to choose between existing and living”, a conspiracy “against our banal love story / to write a different epilogue.” Dreams are also interwoven with imagination. In “Summer Days”, even the sun-scorched heat of Purani Dilli is a time for dreams. Because it is a historical space, love is imagined on the steps of a baoli, the first-time wonder of touch “sliding down the landscape of bodies, / as sleeping buds bloom, the imagined memory of which / I carefully preserve in lid-closed pickle jars.”

There are recurrent images of hope, but of disillusionment as well. In “Snapshots” we see:

The leaves that open out like hearts
are the ones that make us travelers,
defy rules, grow a forest, and then perhaps
carry the smell of wildflowers
in the crevices of the heart
that eventually turns blue,
that licks the ennui that settles as dust.

There are hints of a quest for a deeper fulfilment which also ends in weariness. In “Window Side Story”, the search is a pavement tree’s hungry roots seeking something more. Beneath it, faith is a phallic stone, discarded marigolds and agarbatti sticks “burning out the memory of dark nights”. A cobbler sits below, mending. For “mending is a patient act of reconciliation, / an elfin touch of time restoring the old,/reviving lost love”. Yet, what is lit are billboards of women’s bodies, sequined dreams, enticing. Then the arch observation:

The self gets scattered,
entwined in the beautiful,
entangled in the vulgar.

Yet there is a belief in the remains of dreams. A quest too remains. In “September Shower”, footsteps return late at night:

drunk, drenched, defeated,
yet wishing to get cleansed,
wishing for another September
shower.

One of Bhaumik’s great strengths as a poet is her use of metaphors. In “Of Quarantine, Covid 19 and Parrots”, there is a vivid juxtaposition of the eerie silence of a city awaiting lab reports with the sudden “bursting into brilliant green / of hundred parrots soaring / in the gold of the morning sun.” In “Of Blueness”, Gustave Klimt’s painting, On Lake Attersee brings forth a colour far and deep, touching, lapping our feet / rippling gently, as memory.” Perhaps the most straightforward example of metaphors conveying the time or emotions is in the poem, “A Love Poem”: afternoon is “my damp kitchen cloth, / oil and aroma smeared; the sofa “a chaotic railway platform”, the bed “a dried up river course”, the kitchen “a noisy fish market”, “stoic pots of plants… a graveyard”.

Poems as metaphors

In fact, some poems are metaphors in themselves: “Room” reflects abandonment and gloom, frenzy and fatigue. Perhaps it’s the transitoriness of life forever on the move that gives it these qualities, “its fleeting existence buried deep, unmarked in the vaults of memory.” A contrasting boost in spirit is conveyed in “A Love Poem”, when after failed attempts to recreate days of love, comes the line, “I resign and ask, ‘Write me a love poem, ChatGPT!’”

Though the book abounds in metaphors – of time, of birds, of fireflies, of the morning raga, Ahir Bhairav – one of the most effective juxtapositions revolves around the sun. While the “sun ripens” and is “ready to script its timeless tale of victory”, we get an entirely different view in the poem, “When the Sun Has No Daughter”. In this, there is a searing reference to Nirbhaya and to rape in a station washroom where a woman is “tamed” till she bleeds to death. Here, “the world conjures its cruelties / to change the way we view the sun again.”

In fact, Bhaumik raises important contemporary issues through her poems. In “Of City Tales and Crayon Images”, she writes:

The still eyes of the fish
have left the ripples of river songs
by the ghat, they stare at nothing,
like the dead of Gaza.

In “Ambu”, the memory of cooked rice is painful, for Ambu’s home has been swallowed up by floods, leaving her landless and with no papers to tether her to history. In “October: Home and Homelessness”, there is one Uma who can return home to visit. Another Uma is trapped “beneath the weight of deadlines”, beneath livelihood and living that birth wishes only to recycle them, as she stumbles out of the evening metro, vanishing into the crowd, “losing herself piece by piece.”

While the book conveys the feeling that it is memory and nostalgia that win the day, we get hints of possible dissatisfactions with contemporary living: disillusionment, ennui, boredom, unmet desires. There is a strong poetic dexterity in conveying hopelessness, despair and decay alongside hope, the beauty of nature, and the undying dream of love. There is “the flight of homeward-bound birds” but “the frail palm fronds sketch the gloom/of twilight on the verandah wall”. Yet in “Nirvana”, we note that the climb is uphill and a monastery stands guarding century-old secrets. The poem pauses in this silent landscape to murmur softly: “The pink of the lotus lips / becomes your nirvana.”

Neera Kashyap has worked in newspaper and environmental journalism, specialising in social and health communications. Her early literary writings were dedicated to stories for children and she has also written for young adults. Later, her poetry, short fiction, essays and book reviews appeared in various Indian and international literary journals and anthologies of both poetry and short fiction. Her debut collection of poetry, The Art of Unboxing, is due for release from Red River Press. Cracks in the Wall, her debut collection of short fiction, was recently published by Niyogi Books.

When Time is a Magic Jar, Mallika Bhaumik, Red River Press.

📰 Crime Today News is proudly sponsored by DRYFRUIT & CO – A Brand by eFabby Global LLC

Design & Developed by Yes Mom Hosting