Subhransu Maitra. When My Mother Sang. Kolkata: Penprints, 2023. ISBN: 978-81-964177-1-0 and ISBN: 10: 81-964177-1-3.

Himadri Lahiri

What the mother sang is indeed the central focus of this volume of sixty-two poems. In the title poem “When My Mother Sang,” the twelfth in the book, the mother’s song is the source of all regenerative activities. She sang “Chira nutanere dilo dak,” a Tagore song that beckons the new. Her song revitalised the ‘decrepit house/ tucked away in the bowels of an ancient alley’ and the ‘cramped attic’ where the speaker’s invalid mother lived. ‘The noisy messy evening outside’ burst into musical notes and the world of vegetation sprang forth in luxuriant growth. ‘The irresistible spring and rain flowers’ bloomed all around. Maitra’s poems are not about lush, green countryside; they are about the metropolitan city of Kolkata/Calcutta which he knows inside out. The old colonial buildings, many of them decrepit and worn-out, narrow lanes, old city streets which are silent witnesses to centuries-old cultural history – all make way into his creative world. Maitra is overwhelmingly a poet of the city that oozes its past in every pore.

 

The interplay of the old and the new, despair and hope, the bleak and the beautiful constitutes the theme of the poems of this volume. Spring duly comes and goes following the norms of seasonal cycle, momentarily changing the mood of the city. In the poem “Initiation” the season is imagined as ‘[m]igrant febrile fugitive …/ … passing through the misbegotten city on a furtive visit’ (80). The poems in general speak of the ‘interim’ nature of spring, of the last blazing trail of the flower that refuses to leave the Shimool tree, the brief renewal of life and beauty that the season brings in the midst of the existential crisis of the city-dwellers. In “Should the Flowers Eventuate” the season is again presented as ‘[t]he flickering span of ever-returning ever-fugitive spring’ (15). Shimool is in fact a recurring image in the book. In the opening poem “The Last Flush” we come across the striking image of the city:

 

The flowers are mostly gone.

Only a stubborn Shimool or two

Holding fast to its bough shaking in the wind

Still refuses to abridge its song and trance over

Implacable city expiring through

three centuries of ebb and flow. (9)

 

Assaulting the ‘turbulence of decay,’ refusing to be its prey, this ‘stubborn fragile Shimool’ offers a ‘brutal visibility’ (9). In another poem, the poet addresses the trees as ‘unsung heroes’ and ‘nourishers’ of the city, mentioning specifically Shimool and Palash which ‘launch their transient triumphant songs/… / Over a city that has come alive briefly – only briefly/ Out of the comatose sleep’ (“Residents, Guardians, Mourners” 23). The city is otherwise presided over by ‘the pariah kite,’ a recurrent image again in Maitra’s poems. Its ‘stance is existential defiance amidst gloom/ Inseparable from the city it surveys from a height’ (43). The image of the kite is often accompanied by that of ‘indignant noisy crows, wary of the kite’s beak and claws’ (43). While the ‘pariah kite cries in exuberant, bright-sky delight/from somewhere behind the adjacent highrise/ that cuts the view,’ the ‘crows, more tribal, caw together/ from lesser heights, celebrating the midday lull’ (“Repertoire” 51). The sparrows too ‘add their little notes a little later/ chirping in the afternoon’ (“Repertoire” 51). The city landscape remains incomplete without the ‘low booming hum’ of the pigeons and the sound bites of ‘pariah street dogs’ which ‘[k]eep up a shrill rasping choir at night’ (“Repertoire” 51).

 

Maitra is acutely aware of the historic past of Calcutta which was rechristened as ‘Kolkata’ in 2001. In his poems the cityscape with colonial structures of old buildings, ‘warren of grey old houses’ (“City Blooms” 61), network of lanes, its Coffee House and College Street make their presence felt. In the poem “Coffee House” the poet says, “Two amorphous centuries lapping receding again/ breaking around College Street’ (18). College Street indeed ‘distils history,’ it ‘plunges back and forth/ fusing, enacting its tenses’ (“College Street” 19). It is the historical site of ideological conflicts, reformative zeal, cultural activities initiated by figures like Rammohan Roy, Macaulay, Derozio, and Vidyasagar. Nineteenth-century Renaissance made us culturally hybrid: ‘They made me and split me in twain,’ the poet declares (“College Street” 19). “Kolkata 1970-71” (it was in fact Calcutta then) projects the city as smitten by ‘necrosis,’ as political violence and police atrocities threatened to kill every cell of the vibrant city during Naxalite movement. It was the time, the poet observes, when

 

The sun should have clouded into darkness,

The stars should have fallen apart,

The Ganga should have burst her defiled banks,

The Bay should have assailed the land

smouldering from end to end. (25)

 

Kolkata has two faces – its aggressively luminous look represented by the Bypass and its dingy, ill-lit areas lurking behind it.  The former is illuminated by huge billboards and hoardings projecting ‘glowing images’ of certain ‘assorted certainties.’ However, the poet feels, it ‘will no more thresh and ply;’ on the contrary, the ‘dingy seedy slice of an ill-lit park/ Tucked away down a side street dotted with ragged trees’  where ‘[o]bscure men and women’ – love-birds all – ‘[s]it on cheap cement benches talking…’ holds promises of redemption (“Ode to the Poets of Love”17).

 

While singing paeans to the city, the poet pays respect to the bygone iconic cultural figures: Rabindranath Tagore, Suchitra Mitra, Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, Sankha Ghosh. He even invokes Durga, the Mother Goddess of the Hindus, who is very much part of the cultural landscape of the city. He prays to the Mother, the slayer of the evil, to come to the rescue of poor, ‘ragged boys working for a pittance/ climbing to the top of the dizzy picturesque pandal’ (“Raison d’être” 81).

 

Maitra as a cosmopolitan poet, however, has been nourished by several cultural figures beyond Bengal. He pays homage to ones like Jayanta Mahapatra, Omar Khayyam and Chad Walsh. Particularly appealing is his acknowledgement of debt to Chad Walsh whose book Doors Into Poetry served as refuge to him during a period of acute personal crisis. At that moment in his life, he was ‘an outcast, on the run;’  he was ‘tumbled into quixotic revolt/ Tilting at windmills too big for us to pull down.’ And “[u]nseen you [Walsh] quietly nudged me toward the doors’ of peace and tranquility (57).

 

Maitra’s sympathy for the poor and the oppressed is quite evident in the volume. In poems like “Gravitas” Maitra castigates, with incisive satire, incidents of gang rape and/or murder of a Dalit girl at Hathras in Uttar Pradesh. Similarly scathing is his criticism of politicians who are responsible for children ‘being bombed strafed torn to pieces/ in Gaza and Israel’ (“Child, Hospital and the Rest” 13). His planetary sensibility is summed up by the following lines: ‘Sing inside out – / For Black lives Dalit lives Sparrow lives matter/ Chirring crickets matter/ Pariah kites, pariah dogs matter/Carrion birds, lesser birds, crows, cats matter/ Sunlit slivers of the sky seen from shitholes matter” (“Unlocking” 28).

 

This reviewer would like to call attention of the publisher of the book on two minor issues: first, the dashes mostly appear like hyphens; and secondly, the bold font and bigger font size of some words on the copyright page do not go well with the overall high production standard. The pictures of exquisite buildings, doors, pieces of furniture and the Second Hooghly Bridge that connects the twin cities of Kolkata and Howrah accompany the book. These paratexts support and reinforce the poetic images woven sensitively throughout the collection. The readers will appreciate the Kolkata-based poet’s deep love and affection for his city that witnessed the heights of intellectual vigour and some of the turbulent periods of Indian history.