Poems born of seclusion and solitude

Jaspal Singh

Manmohan, a senior police officer posted at Chandigarh, has been writing poetry since his student days at Amritsar. By now 11 collections of his poems have appeared, the latest being Zeel (finer cord of a stringed instrument). He has ventured into literary criticism and philosophical writing as well, doing a couple of volumes on Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin in Punjabi. In 2013, Manmohan got the Sahitya Akademi Award for his maiden novel Nirvaan, which deals with Buddhist and Marxist problematic. 

The present collection of poems, Zeel, carries 63 poems which have been written by him during his stay at Chandigarh. But most of the verses are born of the poet’s wanderings through the memory lanes. Therefore, Amritsar and its environs and landmarks dot most of the poems. Manmohan was born and brought up at Amritsar, so its tea-stalls, paan shops, narrow lanes, dhabas and historical structures appear as objective correlatives in many poems. He laments “the haphazard layout… over-crowded roads one treads were once so broad, now are extremely cramped”. Further, he states, his city retains the same names of places yet has changed beyond recognition. Only Ghansham Chaurasia, the paan wala, has not changed. He is the same shama for the poet. He is the self-declared emperor of the betel country. His stall remains decorated with the same glass vessels, holding various paan ingredients, being dispensed in exactly the same proportion. From paan wala, the poet visits his favourite tea-stall whose keeper understands his particular or peculiar taste and makes tea with the same proportion of tea leaves, sugar and milk. One can read the day’s paper there and can help oneself to any of sweets stocked in the big glass jars without keeper’s permission. He meticulously notes down everything in his account book. One can laze there for hours together.

The poet revisits his school, college and university days. Memory carries nostalgia also. Manmohan being a police administrator with the central government is usually posted to various parts of the country. His family is permanently settled in Delhi where his wife is an officer with the Delhi Government. So, at most of the places, he has to live alone. He has learnt to ward off his loneliness. Books come to his rescue here. He discovers new worlds in them. Tomes are strewn all over the place in his house and he treats them like his kin who do not expect anything from him and never let him go astray. He has visited the entire world through the colourful crowd of books. At times, poetry comes to pull him out of ennui. So reading and writing stand by him in all weathers.

In a poem titled Vartmaan da Mahakaav (An Epic of the Present), the poet says that whatever you expect may not necessarily happen in history which by all reckoning is a blind alley. Probabilities are its chapters. Whether Abhimanyu or Arjun is the hero, chakravyuh or the Gita are not going to decide. In such situations, only time plays the crucial role. In this poem, the poet rues that so many ages have gone by, but India is still living in the age of the Mahabharata.

When Manmohan moved to Chandigarh, he felt out of place for a while. Then the city assimilated him and the otherness vanished. It became a home and the home shrank to a room. Many flowers were raising their heads outside the window and now Delhi rarely appeared on the memory screen. The poem Maut Bare Sochdian (Thinking about Death) presents a paradoxical situation of load-shedding and withdrawal of an old man when his nerves and neurons become partly inactive in their responses. “The youthful leaps turn into baby-steps. One’s frame starts shrinking. While sitting on a bed or in a chair one looks like a discarded object. A monologue goes on and on in the mind. The turban rests on the shelf and is used once in days, beside it lies a khaki envelope packed with bank-books and FDRs, along with a few diaries, a handbook of daily prayers and a sickly looking old medicine box, always meditating over endless calculations as if one is playing chess or cards with oneself. Every word of the newspaper is read and digested and when the TV is switched on, entire house reverberates and then a child from the neighbourhood brings the message of the death of his grandfather”.

In the poem, Samvedna (Sensitivity), the poet suddenly opens his eyes to the chaotic world around, moving through Orlando, Dallas, Peshawar, Lahore, Twin Towers, Afghanistan, Iraq, Baghdad, Syria and then comes back to India, 1947… 1984… Bhiwandi… Godhra. He believes much more of this is yet to come. Where are the fault-lines? Are they buried in history, religion, mythology, race, colour, cuisine, dress? A conscious poet like Manmohan cannot be at peace with himself. Nevertheless, he has his own limitations. He cleverly skirts the socio-economic-political issues for obvious reasons and finds solace in the Buddhist nirvaan.

Thus unfolds Manmohan’s poetic itinerary meandering through the modulations of the musical notes produced by the Zeel.