Reviews

I have pleaded with the Gods to allow me more time to sit with these glimpses into the poetic soul, into the heart of the fire that drives thought, feeling, experience. To sit with the poet in her bold dance with life, as it ebbs and flows in the rhythm of an ageless and age-old city of Banaras, as it winds with the waters of its life-blood, around corners and into hidden grooves, away from human eyes. A place of my dreamtime for some future gift I share with my heart. In her ode, “The Right Kind of Woman”, Basudhara lassos me in with, “On her forehead, she has a third eye to emit fire, take sides, rake storms. Last night, its lid rusted with disuse”. The nuances of belonging can be interpreted on all levels, in any space, an internal, quiet decision of a never-ending quest.

I touch the tenderness of the poems as they churn out into my consciousness, a steady stream of images, deftly created, nay whispered, into my soul, fooling me into believing that I had trodden those footpaths, swum in its holy liquids, fought my own demons in its underbelly and emerged, wide-eyed into the hustle and bustle of an ancient-yet-modern city, brimming with my tear-stained past and marching unbidden to some distant older me. Yet, I have never gazed into its eyes, nor inhaled its dust. In her poem, “Home Truths”, she decries that “It is only abstract – enjambment, fiction, an apostrophe’s wet-dream”.

Basudhara has tossed and caught the iridescence of life/love/place/city/home/house/nowhere in particular yet part of every hearth and heart. The poems demand your full attention, and clamour for yet another read and perhaps to linger over this verse, that idea or thought, again and again, until a kernel of truth brazenly shouts through the page. And she is wanton in her lusty tryst with words, massaging our emotions in a skillful acrobatic display from a consummate wordsmith, drawing us out from our bomb-shelters and into the promise of a rhythmic dance with nature. In her poem “For a friend in a distant land”, I swoon from this delicate morsel, “I summon in verse a rainbow kneading skies”.

How powerfully she sings her nightingale ode to mother nature, reminding us of the embryonic link that ties all of creation. That we are not outside of the forces of life and death but chained to the circular tithes we must pay for the privilege of breath. The fury and tumultuous abandon with which the mighty Goddess rushes through her banks, shredding our paper-crepe wishes to water-droplets hissing away from the spaces of our yearning, into the ether. Perhaps our future faces/tongues will find these atoms and taste the hopes and dreams of our impetuous youth again. Home, we learn, is the minutae of our daily lives, the dashed dreams and hopes of a generation, the delicate wish of a not too misspent youth until finally we reach the fulcrum of our existence and understanding dawns with the silver in our hair. In her poem “Translating”, Basudhara laments how relationship ruptures occur, “before meanings, like continents, inch apart”.

“Stitching a Home” is both the unfolding and the discovery of who we truly are, beneath the layers of our many lives and roles, trampling geography, history and time.