Arundhathi Subramaniam

 Sunday Reading Task.

Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and writer on spirituality and culture. Winner of the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry in 2015, the Raza Award for Poetry and the International Piero Bigongiari Prize, she mostly lives in Bombay (a city she is perennially on the verge of leaving).

Arundhathi Subramaniam is a poet and writer and on spirituality and culture. She has worked over the years as poetry editor, curator, and journalist on literature, classical dance and theatre. She divides her time between Bombay and a yoga centre in Coimbatore.

       Arundhathi Subramaniam.

 

  As one of India's most important poets, Arundhathi Subramaniam, who has to her credit four poetry collections including 'Love Without a Story', 'When God Is a Traveller', 'Where I Live: New & Selected Poems', 'Where I Live' and 'On Cleaning Bookshelves', besides prose titles like 'The Book of Buddha' and 'Sadhguru: More Than A Life' is busy writing some more poems and exploring her deepening preoccupation with the female voice and presence in the Indian mystic poetry nowadays, she says, "The initial weeks of the lockdown were difficult. 

     When God is A Traveller.

   

*When God Is a Traveller*

Arundhati Subramaniam

 (wondering about Kartikeya/ Muruga/ Subramania, my namesake)

 Trust the god back from his travels, his voice wholegrain (and chamomile), his wisdom neem, his peacock, sweaty-plumed, drowsing in the shadows.

 Trust him who sits wordless on park benches listening to the cries of children fading into the dusk, his gaze emptied of vagrancy, his heart of ownership.

Trust him who has seen enough— revolutions, promises, the desperate light of shopping malls, hospital rooms, manifestos, theologies, the iron taste of blood, the great craters in the middle of love. 

Trust him who no longer begrudges his brother his prize, his parents their partisanship. 

Trust him whose race is run, whose journey remains, who stands fluid-stemmed knowing he is the tree that bears fruit, festive with sun.

 Trust him who recognizes you— auspicious, abundant, battle-scarred, alive— and knows from where you come. 

Trust the god ready to circle the world all over again this time for no reason at all other than to see it through your eyes.

These poems explore various ambivalences - around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megapolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey.

This poem about that. poems also had references to Shiva, Kartikeya and others.Though the poems in When God is a Traveller frequently dwell upon the minute details of everyday life, they also see in those details, hints of a Godhead, an uber-reality. Charmingly elusive avatars of Muruga, Krishna and other divinities appear, composed of the elements of our contemporary reality and occasionally, denied by it. This is also a frank volume of middle age.