By Selma Carvalho
There is a kind of secular light which washes over Siddharth’s collection of poems titled A Moveable East (Red River, 2021), its 136 pages divided into seven sections. I say secular not because he shies away from the sacred but rather because he embraces the sacred with a purity of heart, embraces the universal goodness that lies at the core of disparate traditions, and claims as his own the unique voice of these faiths and cultures, their many moments of shadow and space. He imbues in these traditions a grace whose absence is often deeply felt in our austere lives. Hence, in Siddharth’s poetry, we can with seamless lucidity encounter a Zoroastrian within the fading walls of an Irani café, or a dessert messiah walking arid plains, before we are, quite unexpectedly, called to worship by the muezzin. Indeed, that is exactly what Siddharth aims to do, when he writes in his introductory poem ‘Café Yezdan,’ featured in the section titled ‘Hunger’:
Listen to Siddharth Dasgupta reading.
Each complex strand
within this land comes woven in
multi-religious threads: born Hindu,
bred Catholic, versed Muslim, imbued
Buddhist, and fed Parsi, which is how
things are this morning. Lost faces and
wrinkles and smiles foraged from the
innards of life profusely wept.
Cities weighs heavily on Siddharth’s mind as he weaves words into verse, and asks:
Is a city
a matter of soul or a matter of taste, the
question hovers.
Of his own experience, Siddharth tells me, ‘I grew up in the city of Poona, swathed in glorious weather and open fields of endless summers. Early influences would remain the soulful, artistic pull of my parents, always willing to dance away from the grain.’
Cities continue to fascinate humans even as they repulse us; these sprawling conurbations, which like rivers favour confluence, merging us all into a nothingness, powdering us into homogeneity. The scores of cities written in migratory calligraphy, ring through its crowning crowds, its music, its food, the muscle memory of these fleeting encounters carved into our bark. Siddharth writes in ‘Breakfast on Hafiz Street’:
Each fresh city brings with it
An entrée of thrill and restive provocation
A main course of anonymity, the hopes we’ve cursed
With a sweet thereafter of skin caressing truth
Each foreign address bristles with the brio
Of salt penetrating slivers of soil
Flavour abounding in these circadian hymns
Carnal concerto instigating these morsels to lust
But cities can fade, their carnal lusts replaced by an anodyne detachment, memories like mirages morphing into something unrecognisable; the angst of this loss takes the shape of ‘striated glasses of chai,’ ‘midnight whiskey breath,’ ‘the operatic clatter of rusted green chairs,’ all crystalised into the ‘the casual urgency of a communal urban regret,’ in the poem ‘Once Upon an Irani Café.’
The title of Siddharth’s collection is a nod to Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which was Hemingway’s homage to Paris. In 1950, Hemingway wrote to a friend, ‘If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.’ Indeed, Siddharth, in a poem titled, ‘A Latin Quarter Hunger,’ pays tribute to Hemingway in Paris, ‘Its opulent opera of boulangeries, fromageries, and patisseries/Disgorging a litany of literary tendencies. /Fitzgerald chomps down on a croissant with nonchalance…’ It was in Paris, that Hemingway would cultivate friendships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound; Paris, the very essence of its café culture, would shape the appetites of a literary genius. Siddharth, having visited Paris, writes: ‘I have surrendered to Paris and dived into many of its charms. There’s something about being in Paris that provokes the threefold dream: wisps of a Paris peopled by the Lost Generation; the Paris you inhabit in the now; and a Paris of chimera, anchored somewhere in a dappled future.’
There is of course, always the more complex question of ownership: of cities, of countries, and how the individual can accommodate themself within the territorial grasping of the collective. In the section titled, ‘Flame,’ Siddharth makes an impassioned poet’s plea on behalf of untethered people, people desperate to get to places of safety, to new homelands where their lives can consume what their bodies have long forgotten—permanence and the possibility of a future. These quiet contemplations are fashioned not to question the politics of offering refuge but only to humanise the suffering of those cursed to a nomadic life of political incertitude. When Siddharth does wander into territory which reveal his political leaning, and if one does not feel inclined to agree with these views, as in the poem, ‘To Walk the Earth,’ it does not in any way detract from the beauty of his verse in pleading for a more just morality.
I keep stepping towards and stepping
around the prophecies that are quoted verbatim,
even as my land hails its nuclear precision
and America hails its gun-toting hallways.
Why have the Arabs not raised their voices,
and why do my neighbors practice impotence?
Why has the crudeness of oil become
the lifafa within which life stammers on its course
The section titled ‘Sorrow,’ opens with the simple beauty of the dimeter. Perhaps sorrow is best expressed in the economy of language a dimeter affords, such as one encounters in the poem, ‘Ghazal on Dastur Meher Road.’
This morning dusted
With the howls
Of vanquished wolves—
Why must I awake?
The high-pitched confession
Of a shaman, his throat
Roused by ache
Flirting with the frayed
Edges and languages
Of ether—
Why must I awake?
Not surprising most of the poems in this section are sung to lost loves. And perhaps the lives of nomads, poets and lovers are always arching, crossing over to reach each other, keen to find words which express solidarity. In the poem titled, ‘The Absence of This,’ there emerges the perfect meeting of these lost souls:
Conversations and migrations behave much
the same, leaving you foreign, distant, stammering
for the inescapability of hope. These words don’t
own consonants or the scaffolding of syllables;
they serve as footsteps, bridging the smell of
earth in one land to the sea dividing thought,
memory, and other truths in absentia, in another.
The next section titled ‘Melody,’ pays homage to, what one suspects are long time companions of the poet; Leonard Cohen makes an appearance. Jeff Buckley who did the most-coveted version of Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ also gets a mention. Much like the writer Amit Chaudhuri in ‘Afternoon Raag’, Siddharth pays tribute to the Raag of Indian classical tradition. As with faith traditions, Siddharth likes to restore equilibrium even in music traditions, and soon a tribute appears to sarod virtuoso Ustad Amjad Ali Khan.
Ustad Amjad Ali Khan doesn’t believe
In tidal propensities, given as he is
To creating waves, while the rest of us
Await, with disquiet, vowed bliss on shores
Ustad Amjad Ali Khan carries the lightness
Of mist in his eyes, each blink an arousal
Of sapphire and the propinquity
Of commensurate Gods
Quite rightly, an ode to poetry, which as a literary form has its origins in cadence and cantos, makes its appearance in the Melody section, in an offering titled, ‘Desiderata, Times Two.’ This poem was particularly revelatory of male desire. In a world, where male sexuality has almost become synonymous with violence and the mindless consumption of the female form, this delicate rendering reminds us that male desire too can exist in a quiet longing of wanting to experience the other in their totality.
Three other sections follow, titled in turn, Desire, Horizons, and Home. Thematically the collection loosely unifies around disparate lives converging, better explained by Siddharth himself: ‘What’s at the heart of things with this collection is a sense of place—one that’s both itinerant and rooted.’ Every sentence sets in motion a thought and a pause, a balm for the soul and a redemption. His mastery over language, his ability to elasticate it to paint imagery and draw from it substance, strategically employ enjambments, deftly use assonance, alliteration, and the half-rhyme, is craftsmanship at its best, poised to challenge the supremacy of the Old Masters of Indo-Anglian poetry. I can only hope that Siddharth achieves the recognition that is quite clearly due to him, or we will all be left pitying the nation that cannot find its poets even as we honour the false prophets of commercial success.
Siddharth Dasgupta is a writer of poetry & fiction. A Moveable East is his fourth book; others include Letters From an Indian Summer (Fingerprint) and The Sacred Sorrow of Sparrows (Niyogi). His words appear in literary journals across the world, while he has read in places like Mandalay, Bombay, Galle, Lucknow, and Istanbul. Occasionally, Siddharth explores fragments of travel and culture for a smattering of publications. He lives within the swirling nostalgias of the city of Poona. Follow the author’s literary detours on Instagram @citizen.bliss or here
To purchase A Moveable East on Amazon, click here.
The banner picture is by Nishaan Ahmed and downloaded from unsplash.com