Chitra reviews “Wives”, which explores spousal perceptions through 48 poets, revealing love’s complexities, from fierce intimacy to stark estrangement, in diverse voices, exclusively for Different Truths.
This anthology that carries the creations of 48 poets, published by Hawakal Publishers Private Limited (2023) and edited by Ankit Raj Ojha, and beguilingly titled Wives, courses through perceptions of wives by their spouses. Their impressions are sometimes in the cadence of melodies and at other times they come with the jounce of hard rock but, almost, always, their images blend the tangible with the intangible. Inextricably. It reaffirms the beauty of belonging, hopeless though it may seem sometimes. And avows that the love of a wife must be earned.
The lines in this volume speak of fierce love and disagreement, between husbands knowing their wives fully and, in turn, being known wholly, and of the duo attuning to one another. This travel in an unstable field is loaded with surprises, dissatisfactions, and a definite transformation of their present personas.
Past Life Memories
Couples in this volume have one other thing to contend with: nostalgia. After years have gone by; memories of their past lives resurface. It is like seeing an old, faded photograph of themselves where they recognise their images but fail to remember what it was to be like those persons. Alterations in the past affect the changes that will come as time goes by.
This volume which explores the intersection of two lives, their inner workings, and secrets, is as much about transformation and regeneration as it is about complexity and dissolution. If it lays bare ways of how two people build each other up, it also exposes how they break each other. In essence, it delves into the paradoxes of human desire and connectivity with both ingenuity and
compassion. At its core, is the notion: what’s love if it isn’t in the going?
Wives bring forth conversations that can never end. It uncovers the raw, unnerving, everyday drama of what is said and what remains unsaid between couples as it does the secret codes of women, the mysteries and misapprehensions hidden within, which only they understand and communicate differently so it is unintelligible to men.
Stories Unsaid
In the same breath, poem after poem unspools the multiple thoughts going on at any given moment within women’s minds as they unroll the multitudes of stories that remain unsaid. Is it a case where one partner is in the position of knowing and the other is not? It is for the reader to decide.
With a cool assurance, editor Ankit Raj binds poems in diverse styles, whether rhymed, free, prose, or ekphrastic, and voices from twelve regions of the world. Some carry zing, others quietude, a few more longing, some quiet humour, others restlessness or permanent disappointment, and others despair.
Cosmopolitan and Global
His sensitivity has allowed for a variety of man-wife relationships, including married, same-sex, separated, divorced, and even widowed, which makes this volume stylishly cosmopolitan and decidedly global. In doing so, he has created a safe space where cosmopolitanism, a personal attitude that humanises the world melds with globalisation, which holds the potential to homogenise this plurality.
Ojha categorises the poets alphabetically and their poems roll out with no deliberate or conscious intent to separate them by theme. This keeps the suspense of the unanticipated alive.
Aditya Shankar’s ‘After a While’ makes a case for the lush and lyrical promise of fresh love, its all-consuming nature, expansive freedoms, and new dreams, the fortification it derives from its context and nourishment it distills from the gaze of others:
“My car halts, melding into fields where wildflowers gleam.
Upon the massive boulders near Soochippara’s cascade,
Forgotten, the sky held in our lovelorn gaze,
And the squirrel that watched our embrace.”
New Terrains
Afsar Mohammad ‘Together’ conjures a different kind of devotion where the husband and wife delve into new geographical terrains with gusto and as much ardency as they do into each other’s bodies and minds. To the poet, this enterprise marks a different kind of intimacy, one that is quiet, whispered and hides within their dark interiors yet brings warmth in its quietness with the
possibility of erupting with volcanic intent.
“Limping
across empty spaces
Known/unknown entities and
Countless trouble spots
We shoot a wide array of questions
Into each spot and
stare into their interior caves.”
Amit Majmudar argues the stamp of love lies in its imbalance, its contrarieties, its whimsicalities and its vulnerabilities:
“Falling out is natural. So is falling back into bed.
A love with no fights is a patient with no vitals.”
A prudent question, it is said, is one-half of wisdom. In Aneek Chatterjee’s case, the answer to his query completes the arc. He keeps this insight hidden, eternally, inside his skin and bones, as his poem ‘Curriculum Vitae’ reflects.
“You have walked with me
on potholes and autumn clouds.
On breakdowns and uncertain,
murky restarts.
When I wanted to know,
Which one you liked most,
you said, the person who dared
to jump to clouds, from potholes.”
Stronger and Wiser
Estrangement may not happen for a reason. You may not even get stronger and wiser but be pained, discontent and teetering as Ankush Banerjee’s ‘Blue’ says.
“To meet you and feel cut open
like fruit, like a suitcase that bursts open while you
collect your boarding pass…”
Grant Shimmin’s ‘The Wheels of Tragedy’ carries the leitmotif of estrangement ahead. The subject is the loss of a son. While his loss is earth-shattering and crumbles his world, his deprivation, strangely, brings closeness to his companion. It is tumultuous undoubtedly yet somehow grounding.
“And all we can do is hold
on to each other, pain clung
to pain, until it eases
enough to take our tears home”
In ‘Daylong Wanting’ Jaydeep Sarangi speaks of the moments, acts, and spaces that create such a sense of closeness and oneness and what it takes to achieve this.
“Day’s light rides on affection, desires and payers. Home.
She rides on daily acts and games that hearts must play.”
A lucky man finds such consonance and harmony in a woman who is happy when he is happy and sad when he is sad, says Jeffrey Zable. In ‘A Lucky Man’, he challenges everyone who thinks love is a colour.
“Married over four years, and over seven years together,
most of the time I’m not conscious
that she is a different color than I am.”
On the other end of the spectrum, is Justin Lacour’s poem ‘Sonnet (II)’ which is neither complimentary nor forgiving of his other half. In fact, in a rather crushing description of her misdemeanours, he says,
“the most mundane part of you is crushing,
that small part, the part you thought was nothing.”
In Kiriti Sengupta’s ‘Missus’, the husband amusingly fails to wound his missus in the manner in which he intends.
“My falling-out
fails to furcate.
Her silence, the shield.”
Light and Rough
Skirmishes take on another tone and tenor, light and rough, in Kushal Poddar’s ‘Oh, Wife’.
“Silence dawns when we realise
our tiff has been the knives gifted by
the Magi. She fights for my sake.
I lose for hers.”
Absence is another recurring theme that the volume carries forward. Onkar Sharma’s ‘When Not Home’ is a wistful reminder of what a missing spouse means.
“A day’s delight, now tainted by disaster,
as I realise her absence from home.
The wallpaper flowers yearn for her laughter,
while I drool in a corner, watching TV alone.”
In a bold departure, Richard-Yves Sitoski in ‘Kemble Mountain’ talks of a wife pining for a man working in the city while the charms of her husband’s weathered face and rustic manners are lost on her. The poem touches on what it is to love and not be loved in return.
“over stew she kept her eyes
west of where he sat
these lands weren’t meant
to magnify a woman
but to take a little every day”
In the absence of hope, in the face of broken dreams, Sanket Mhatre in ‘A New Desolate Night,’ highlights the bleakness of distance, the stark brutality of indifference and the harshness of a failed imagination.
“When the alphabets of silence and distance are misplaced,
we harvest words in hectares of formless maps,
needle-shaped, with absolute precision.
The molecular structure of our fear self-learns, restructures
pain as if it were an automated prophecy,
injecting a new desolate night under sedated dreams
and a stale morning after.”
Finality of Separation
Torn asunder with the finality of separation, with the dread of two lives
disentangled and absent from one another’s, Sudeep Sen’s ‘Decree Nisi’, says,
of the endgame:
“Twenty-one years ago, I wrote
‘Day Before Summer Solstice’ –
A testament of my love and marriage.
Now, you carefully choose this day
to burn down that sacrament –
stardust to ash, ash to deathly black.”
A father’s presence is erased as his wife and daughter bond. Steve Denehan in ‘Barcelona, October 2018’, however, sees his absence as a happy one and himself as springtime-happy rather than alone against this backdrop.
“as a person there but not there
blood warm in me
pulsing through a somehow springtime heart
budding, blooming, beating”
Uday Shankar Ojha’s ‘The Way the Wind Blows’ explores the absence of another kind, the shrinking spaces for husbands, and the subversion of roles.
“knives smell blood trickling
from unaccustomed fingers
fishing plump pumpkin seeds.
She stamps defiant;
he slides softly.”
Where does balance lie in this tempest-tossed world of love and longing, in the face of discouragement and loss, in the process of holding on and letting go? Is it a point between anger and calm? Is a balance, an enlightened arrangement, even possible? These are questions the volume raises and it invites its readers to introspect upon.
Cover photo sourced by the reviewer
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