Scent of Rain: Remembering Jayanta Mahapatra |
Poetry | edited by Ashwani Kumar| Red River (2024) |
ISBN 978-93-92494-93-2 | Pp. 290 | Rs. 499

Resonances of silence and introspection.

The buses and trams are gone off the streets
A city tree starts bleeding in the neonlight
My white eyes are turned in
To doors framed in their crowded silences
Where my body hangs in the air as a question
The ground lonely, dropping below my feet
This night is more than what answers all lies.

  – “City Night, 2 a.m." from Jayanta Mahapatra’s first volume – Close the Sky, Ten by Ten
(Dialogue Publications, 1971)

Jayanta Mahapatra is no longer with us in person but his voice will remain with us for ages. Time flows relentlessly, waiting for no one, yet the moments we have on this earth are filled with our understanding of the world and our attempts to articulate it while we are here. Despite our desire to swim against the currents, or perhaps sit down to take it all in; the waters of time reach up to you to ask you to continue your journey to the beyond.

Scent of Rain edited by Ashwani Kumar is a beautiful tribute to Mahapatra, 189 poets from across the country come together to honour a beautiful soul. The book opens with a prologue by the editor, offering readers a glimpse into the magnanimous life the poet lived through his works. The writings – where each sentence and each line invokes a thought process, making his poems, as the editor eloquently states – “…reveals and revels in existential and ecological dilemmas of life – arising out of ruins of history, and ravages of modernity.”

The book opens with Adil Jussawalla’s reflection on the interconnectedness of life in a garden, highlighting the symbiotic relationship all life shares with the earth.

The garden’s earth yawns.
It has a pink tongue. It has ears.
There are days when the garden’s dog
is also the garden’s earth. (The Garden’s Earth Yawns, 15)

It then transitions to Anand Thakore’s poem, which delves into the element of water, capturing the soul’s metaphorical lightness of the soul and finding a moment of tranquillity amidst the chaos.

Reaching for what’s right here, my arms outstretched,
I float at odds with all I am immersed in.
My suffering ends where these blues begin. (Nocturne Composed in a Swimming Pool, 22)

Anjali Purohit masterfully integrates both elements in her poem, exploring the transitional space between hope and reality; she examines the fleeting nature of experiences and the inevitable return to reality.

we walked there a soft
tongue breaking the silence
with words of salt
the room up in smoke, sear
the heat (Liminal, 26)

This return to reality has been poignantly portrayed by Arjun Rajendran in his poem, who addresses the theme of absence and memory, contrasting the memory of a person with the emptiness left by their absence.

I knock on the door, then open
it to the shrapnel of tidiness.
This is no charade. Combs
smiling through their teeth,
bereft of ugly tufts, grease
and stale oil. No bindis on your
mirror. (This is Still Your Room, 34)

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s short poem delves deeper into the idea of loneliness where he quietly reflects on the external beauty of a house that starkly contrasts with an inner sense of emptiness: “My house luminous; my day burnt to ash.” (January, 42)

E.V Ramakrishnan expands on this by exploring themes of history, memory, and cultural shifts and contemplates the many histories and the erasure or rewriting of certain narratives.

The river extends its hand over the narrow
ridge of history. The haze of oblivion
hangs low over the tombs beneath an overcast
July sky. The city has many pasts
to choose from. (The Dutch Cemetery in Surat, 74)

The book is enriched with sketches and photographs that capture Mahapatra’s diverse timelines, including Jayant Parmar and Jatin Das's drawings. Jatin Das’s poem meditates on the concept of line as a continuous entity that divides space. The line becomes a metaphor for the journey of the mind, unbounded by history or limitations.

A line has no history,
A line never ends.
It begins and flows
Like blood. A river
That meets the sea. (Line, 92)

Lincoln Murasingh’s poem quietly contemplates identity and loss with a quiet sense of resignation. The metaphor of shedding skin represents the transformation that the poet goes through.

Slowly, slowly I shed my skin
Slowly, slowly I forget my words
Quietly I am lost. (Quietly, 124)

M.K Ajay invites the readers into a peaceful meditative space within the mind, where quiet reflection, dreams, and memories intertwine.

In the middle of my mind,
a pond.
Around it, soft pebbles,
green grass, an egret.
Within the pond,
ripples, and goldfish
that someone forgot to move into the aquarium. (Centred, 126)

Mamang Dai moves further on when she recognizes the continuous nature of the search for wisdom, recognizing it as a journey passed down through generations.

In the sun our faces were golden
Stringer of beads
braiding the moments,
the truth about life is desire.
It is the mad soul that rises
rising with the wind—— (In Seeking, 134)

Pravasini Mahakud’s poem, translated by Mahapatra, captures the complex interplay between solitude and the longing for companionship.

Even in the scent of the mahua carried on the breeze
A frail voice reaches me.
A soft dawn raga breaks my sleep What is this friendship with loneliness? 

                       (This Voice of Loneliness, 168)

A beautiful poem by Soni Somarajan extends this theme, reflecting on the innocence of childhood disrupted by unexpected conflict and disorder bringing one’s attention to the ephemeral quality of such experiences.

The past, rent by peals
of pleasure, peeled off into the light fantastic
and the sun-pelted ground ceased its siesta
for a games hour come too soon, as the bittersweet day
clenched its wet fist to extract as much it could,
lest it ran out of names of oranges to fill these lines. (Prank, 222)

Yves Ouallet’s poem pays homage to the “Banyan tree” – the loss and the effect that loss has on its surroundings. It evokes a sense of orphanhood and the search for solace after such a significant loss.

We are all orphans of Orpheus
But in the silence after the earthquake
Without words his lyre is sailing on the waves of the world. (Banyan Tree Cut Down, 257)

Mahapatra’s poems often contained an element of pervasive silence, a dominant quality in his work. Mahapatra has discussed this exploration of silence in an interview, where he said –

Silence is a sort of idea in my work, which may come as a revelation, and perhaps it will come ... as a result of living simply- not aggressively--and the mind begins to flow like water. Or perhaps silence is an opposite pole to this: I mean there's always something eluding one in life that something I have never been able to find, even in whatever I can call my own--like a wife or son ... let me call that my silence. (Inner View: Jayanta Mahapatra Talks to N. Raghavan, page- 61)

Poets in this beautiful anthology pay tribute to this profound silence. I wish I could include more voices here, as each one of them comes with its own set of silences and moments of introspection. For now, every page of this book is like a banyan leaf that remembers the tree that was once a part of its existence.