Satya Mohanty’s ‘Migrants Chronicle and Pandemic Musings’ traces pandemic footprints

Akshaya Kumar

THE sheer scale and strangeness of the Covid-19 pandemic triggered off a poetry pandemic. For poets, bunkered as they were in their apartments, writing turned out to be an act of both catharsis and outreach. Most of them, however, relapsed into apocalyptic biblical narratives, or just dug out metaphors of the Holocaust or Partition to measure the magnitude of the medical nightmare; some just turned inward to sing sweet sad songs of quarantined existence.

Satya Mohanty treads along a different and difficult axis. He chooses to chronicle the pandemic as an event of immediate lived history that can neither be dovetailed into archetypal parables of disaster, nor be reduced into an occasion of rehearsing the idiom of existential angst.

Divided into two sections, ‘Migrants Chronicle’ and ‘Pandemic Musings’, the collection of poems takes us to the very specificities of sight and site of the pandemic with a sustained focus on the travails of the migrants, which the poet empathetically addresses as “guests conflated into loveless bondage”. Right in the opening poem, without any aesthetic gloss, Mohanty demands from his readers a heartfelt response to his poetic subjects. The “fleeing hordes” of the “untamed” migrants collectively stand for the resilience of urban India’s “castaways”, who wear “betrayal like a sash of honour”. Migrants embody tales within tales — from side-stepping the police batons as a matter of routine to their long march with “soles sloughing off/ like snake skin” towards their “hallucinating” homes during lockdown. The collection is a poetic archive of these tales, told with care, sensitivity and essential human touch.

While tracing journeys of the migrants in hostile topographies, Mohanty relies more on his graphic skills than allegorical correlates, which lend a rare sense of intimacy and immediacy to the poetic expression. In lines like these —

She cried; her children cowered.

Onlookers stared on without

trying to stop,

Their hunger and weals on feet

Rolled into a charade of

discipline.

She got up and gathered her

children,

Wiping tears with the diaphanous fringe.

Broken, she started walking back

Through the cartography

of cruelty.

— different registers of reportage, history-writing, portrait-painting, and poetry merge in one artistic continuum that transports the reader to the ground zero of the pandemic with persuasive pull. The “incomplete voyage”, the “shredded promises”, the “torn map”, “sprawling shadows”, “quivering lips”, and a host of such saturnine images cumulatively augment the sense of dread that the pandemic instilled among us. While each poem runs its own tense narrative course, at times the poet hits upon punch-lines such as these — “Our delusions are not deluxe at all”, “The Constitution was on vacation”, “Our flight remains in arc, we don’t look for stars”. These lines keep reverberating as grim epigrams of a long diseased present, its plaintive pathos.

But what really accentuates the mood, and lends necessary semiotic thickness to the collection, is the inclusion of a series of pencil drawings of Jatin Das. The art in free hand and the calibrated verbal idiom impart textuality to the musings, and thus salvage the collection from being a requiem in monotone. Right from the cover sketch of a frail woman marching unflinchingly, barefoot with a load of baggage on her head, to a masked woman staring with blank eyes — the bare outlines in blank ink provide a compelling cultural horizon to the experience of the pandemic. The jugalbandi of the poet and the painter ensures a resounding post-pandemic life to the collection.