Emeralded into the crevices of
words
our roads emerge with coffee and brine
to fan out far towards a city a peak, a town --
each an odd-eyed rooster in one-legged patience.
I see one losing its blue
in the smear of newsprint
another being pocketed
by hands that grope --
grope my soft tissues
beneath the skin of gauze
but the ones bunched deep
inside my throat go untouched!
So, I can gurgle: "Quataquatantankua, Quataquatantankua,
Quataquatantankua."
Ramro chha, ramro chha, ramro chha? And the reply bubbles
up in the foothill methane:
All is good, nothing's amiss
where gods sleep; we keep awake to sharpen our verbs in the dawn.
A Trek with the Buddha Bard
Reading Annapurna Poems
Yuyutsu
RD Sharma’s face is like a mountain terrain, when the earth emerges in the
gods’ peaks after a flash flood or when a river has receded after the monsoon’s
regal fury. I noticed this as soon as I sat down opposite to him in the
surprisingly sparsely populated Barista coffee shop in New Delhi’s fashionable
Khan Market shopping area. Poet of the Himalayas, Yuyutsu’s greeting resounded almost
true in what he wrote in “In the Mountains”: Fragile my
eyeglasses/ fragile and foreign/I take them off; /There’s
a speck of a scar in them. //On the mule path /I take
them off /to face the green /stretch of mountains /beneath
the saddle of Annapurnas.
Well,
almost true, because he didn’t wear eyeglasses at our meeting! His dark irises
reflected the green he writes about and the twining paths he sees better
without his educated eyeglasses. And since we met to chat – we didn’t waste
time to get on first-name terms – the discussion rightfully turned quickly to
his meditative collection Annapurna Poems, a Nirala Series book
published in 2008 and reprinted several times since.
On that
sweltering summer evening, leafing through the Annapurna poems brought in a
sudden whiff of cool mountain air. Musical and reflective. Indeed, Yuyutsu’s
poetic tenor is pretty much that of a bard, his voice that treks higher and
higher into the wild beautiful upper Himalaya bringing alive the smile of the
Buddha and the semiotics of the region’s everlasting gods and goddesses, the
Yeti and other resident animals, the soulful rivers, and the ice-kissed rain.
True, Yuyutsu laments the loss of a familiar landscape he witnessed prior to
political trouble fanning out across Nepal. But his enthusiasm is very much
rooted to the peoples’ grasp of their own surrounding, the Nepal that is home
to communities and creeds, whether he sees them in the backdrop of the Maoist
insurgency or that of a defunct monarchy.
On the
level of language, this poetry takes us straight into the heart of the mountain
country, Nepal’s unique ethos and the nature that entertains both snowy seasons
and hidden eternal gardens. The mule paths, the ‘leech-greasy’ forests, the
spells under which the mountain people live and tell fantastic tales, the
‘magnificent daggers of snow’, all build up a world where nature is more than
just a phenomenon. It is a companion to the poet and his perception. The
cognitive faculty of the poet and the reader works in tandem in recognizing the
many layers of meanings unfolded in each aspect of “Annapurna Poems”, exactly
like the different layers of the snow. The permafrost is made of the
century-old legends and tales on which have grown new fables and events.
Yuyutsu
is a poet of expressions as he traverses a train of simplicity. He does not
twist language in any show of wizardry. He believes in words and sentences, as
they are known and heard in the Himalayan reality, to take him along the
mountain journey to rediscover the known nomenclature and trusted actions. All
he does is re-paint the scenes of Annapurna in unique details and from
surprising angles. Like little Tibetan thangkas. In these scenes,
he tells us about those place names that ring out the jeweled eco-system of a
mountain town or village as familiar as our recurrent dreams. With him, we walk
the salt tracks, the gorge trails and visit Birethanti. Ghorepani, Gandrung,
Tadapani, Lake Fewa, and many such tongue-trilling spots. For him, Hillside
roosters/Punctual, announcing the dawn //are known elements. If
sometimes they might appear delightfully alien to our practiced eyes: Possessing
floral /Faces of riverside birds
They
still draw us into the world of Annapurna like ice drops in the cracks (Yuyutsu
himself says in the foreword of the book that his poems exist in each crack of
this magnanimous mountain world).
Even in
this pristine surrounding something troubles the poet who watches the spray of
the white surf: on greasy crotches /of huge mossy rocks //started
singing … coughing out /the cacophony of cruel cities
In
Yuyutsu’s poetry one might like to find the Blake-ian dilemma of having to
dividing the human soul between Nature and its sufferance, mingle her own fate
and existences with that of gods, the Yeti and shamans, and the myriad
mysterious of Shangri-La, where imageries take fantastic shapes and have their
own sensual and sensuous existence (River: Morning)
… each
time I come /to her deafening banks //to gleam my
dreams /over the plump flanks of her warm body … and a wrinkle
appears /across the shriveled leaf of my life.
However,
he is not merely a romantic poet. What comes across is his deep admiration for
the Annapurna region as a system tied to the rest of the world – those parts of
the world where he is a traveler of a different kind, giving talks and
workshops, reading his published work and attending literary events. In the
context of these ‘worldly’ acts where he attributes his own poetry having the
“otherworldly” and “archival” quality, he is very much a realist. The book’s
first section, “Little Paradise Lodge”, is an account of Nepal and Annapurna’s
past and present. Interestingly, ‘lodge’ appears to be a pun on ‘lost’ as if he
was talking about a ‘little paradise lost’. To me the poems in this section are
very much a ‘lost and found’ affair.
On the
other hand, quite prominently, his Eliotesque sarcasm for the modern city life
and the external influences on his much loved landscape of rains and snows
adorn the images he paints in “Rains”: … This summer they held me up /In
the deserts of their skyscrapers. … my face in the dark /feeling
tips of snow sacred fishtails of Machapuchchare.
In
“Mules” too, their ringing bells are but ‘beating notes of a slavery modernism
brings’. While mapping the ‘bloodthirsty mule paths around the glacial of
Annapurna’, Yuyutsu watches: cartons of Iceberg, mineral water bottles, /solar
heaters, Chinese tiles, tin cans, carom boards //sacks of rice /and
iodized salt from the plains of Nepal Terai. … human and mule lives meet
Rain,
river, snow, singing gorges and brooks rule the landscape of Annapurna Poems.
The romance is palpable between the poet and his subject, almost Sufi in
character, ‘madness’ being one of its virtues. Yuyutsu is in complete
enchantment of his terrain as a lover is and this love’s longing is realized in
a woman’s physical quest (A Lonely Brook): a lonely woman /waits
for a stranger to come //and burst
the ice
frozen between her thighs //to
make a flame
of her
cold sleep…
Conversation
with the river (River) is a personal history, a sequel to the secret rendezvous
with the beloved and is artistically lusty. Between your decisions
/and my
flickering lamps /the river mad /you,
you poet, you bastard, go away!
With
Yuyutsu we travel to Ghandrung where a ‘young girl of the scarlet shawl
waits/for the colorful procession/of mules carrying cartons of Tuberg beer to
pass’ or to Ghorepani, all the while delightfully apprehensive or even curious
if a Yeti was following ‘your trail in the desolate mountains’.
Among
these portraits resembling eternity’s passing of time in the mountain world, we
empathize with the pain in the poets voice (Fish): Wives wait the final
winter /of my rot, opening up /the greed /of
their slithering fish /I return to a poem /I postponed
decades ago /to touch the mating serpents /slithering
on the tip of illicit door /called death.
The
book’s second section “Glacier” takes this sentiment to a crescendo as one
feels literally like climbing heights with titles like Kala Patthar, Gauri
Shankar, Summit and The Buddhist Flag Flutters and looking below with a
rooster’s eye view at the fields, the forests and the (once) playful courtyards
with their brass bells. The overture continues with the third part “Sister Everest”,
a pithy and less descriptive section. In that, the latter is highly evocative.
If the first sections read like an ethereal ‘inward’ trek through the upper
Himalayan terrain, this section readies us for the fourth one – “The Annapurna
Man” – rooted more in the poet’s ‘outward’ experiences. A very brief section,
it spews more pain than pleasure. To some extent, I came out of the book
through this section with a sense of abrupt termination, as if Yuyutsu’s pain
had to invite a quick clinical surgery. For this, the poetry in this section
seems disjointed from the book’s original spirit.
Especially,
I felt “Silence” is too much of rumination, too personal and reads more like
purgation than poetry. The best piece in this section is “Space Cake,
Amsterdam”, a witty poem combining introspection and observation by ‘this man
from Kathmandu’ (one may well imagine, the rest of our chat that evening
centered around that one fantastic experience Yuyutsu recounted to me). The
air-conditioned air at that Barista throbbed at my mirth on reading and
re-reading the line – ‘whatever happens, you can always make a comeback’!
NABINA
DAS is a poet and fiction writer currently based in Hyderabad. She teaches
Creative Writing and has won several writing awards and grants at home and
abroad while being published widely. Her poetry has been translated into
Assamese, Bengali, Hindi and Croatian
