Finding Soho

My earliest memories of Bivar Road go so far back, they now belong to another world. I was there even before I was born. I've been told the story of the earthquake that shook Shillong at the time of my mom's pregnancy innumerable times. The house shook with trepidation then and I vicariously shared that moment with its inhabitants. From our earliest days, Arnav, Pilty and I spent every summer in the house. The long, tortuous and then painstaking drive from Guwahati (the roads weren't any good those days) involved hours of suffering through a miasma of diesel fumes and exhaust from factories (our cars didn't have air-conditioning then), but once the car drove past Mawlai, fresh, pine-filled bursts of Shillong air washed over our faces. Somewhere around the cantonment as you entered, a weeping willow hung sorrowfully on the side of the road, and Mom usually pointed it out, 'See that tree? It's called a Weeping Willow.' Nana moved to Bivar Road after his re...

Sampurna Chattarji's Absent Muses covers a wide swathe of experiences and sentiments. Reading her collection is a journey through the poetic consciousness as it encounters, contends with and finally captures the many different experiences of the writing subject. It is, as it were, a collection of collections, a collage of the different images we map onto the world. The recognizable characters that crowd her everyday reality are the muses that inspire poetry through their absences. Their conversations are like "alms" clutched tightly in the hand. She says she must read them later in open palms, even as sometimes they are swept clean by time, memory and, as it becomes acutely evident, geography. Chattarji's poems are strongly embedded in the dynamics of human friendship and relationships. Some of her poems directly speak to or about friendship and relationships but many are about their absence, or the shadow of their overwhelming former presence. In 'Translations...

The journey around London and the West End is a long one. There are so many epithets for the West End: big, wide, polyglot, mixed-up, far-off. There are so many things one can say. Each place has its own metaphor. The word that comes to mind when thinking about the West End is compositeness. Many of the places are Classical or Gothic or Corinthian, many of the people “multi-exit”, many of the buildings new glass monsters. Yet all of them speak of a certain present and former glory. One only has to look hard enough. It is said that in this mixed-up, often mad, world of ours, each thing that exists gives up and forsakes something of what it is, to let the rest become something that is bigger. Each thing halves in attrition, for the big things to become bigger. So, in places like the West End, one just has to find that something that has been given up and that something that has become bigger (and better?). There is always something to see and something to learn, from the smallest of plac...