A Poet's Journey into Self

By Nikita Parik, Kolkata, India

As a poet belonging to the urban cosmopolitan slice of the society, my poems were often inundated with very urban elements. What is our relationship to the city we live in and the cities we travel to? And within those spaces, the spaces we constantly dance in and out of? These questions often found themselves lurking in my poems, making the dialect of one friendly Uber bike driver in Hyderabad into the city itself for me, or the yellow walls of a cafe in Bangalore, a kaleidoscope of yellowing memories.

This quarantine, however, has resulted in a change in our interaction with these spaces. We've been immobile, locked up in our houses, away from the distinct smells and eccentricities that make up a city.

April being the National Poetry Writing Month, I decided to participate and write a poem a day for the entire month. And I observed how the resources that were available to me, that have always been available to me, showed up in my poems in newer ways during this lockdown. From my house, I cannot see the mosque or the temple, but I can hear the Islamic call for prayer, the azaan, five times a day. I can listen to the temple bells in the evening. These became little guests in my poems.

One particular day, when the news about the death figures got particularly overwhelming, I imagined my window to be a patient, body still warm in the newness of death, and the fistful of sky visible from it became a hurriedly-stitched hospital gown providing a morsel of grace to the dead. On other days, the same window became a lover, a portal into another world.

The wooden windowpane of my sub-
conscious is painting a tree in my sleep.
The flowers taste of death. This window
follows me wherever I go.

A photograph of my mother and aunts (not yet a “mother” or “aunts”) from 1985 became a poem, making me look for my reflection in their smiles, making me question why forefathers alone get the privilege of naming genealogies. A water-colored sunflower I'd painted many monsoons ago became a poem.

Between wakefulness
and sleep, I sometimes birth
lucid syntaxes of sunflowers
on a canvas. The petals spiral
out like repressed thoughts, a
fibonacci of yellow thoughtlessness.
(Signification of a Sunflower)

Dreams, language, and memory danced on the stage of the conscious and the subconscious, and I had the awareness to not dismiss them, as I may have under normal circumstances. When you are hyper aware of yourself, it can sometimes become a little discomforting. I had dialogues with myself that were probably long due, and so I saw myself writing on things like a single deep breath:

Maybe God is
the singular breath
that floods you whole?

And prayers:

Fazr azaan breaks
the sky into two.
The lit half is a prayer.

And Forgiveness:

This life is a droplet
hanging
on the eyelash of fate;
forgiveness
just makes
the fall easier.

And silences.

This one month was so cathartic. Ten years later, when I look back at these historical and frustrating COVID-19 times, I will think of the ways it affected my writing, forcing the writer in me to be closer to myself.