Neetha Prasad
Words lingered on the iridescently blue screen in one of those days that felt like any other day that had gone by. The glare was too much to bear and the words too familiar to go inconspicuous to lay buried in the recycle bin.
“Why do they name it the “recycle bin”?
Does anything that go inside it , ever come out recycled ?’ .
Thoughts too leave traces that linger on and on.
The blackhole of a recycle bin should embrace into its vortex, these words too; words that reek of denial , of rejection …
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Dear ma’am,
I regret to inform you that we will not be able to publish your work.
Regards,
>>>>>>>>>>>
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In fact I have no regrets. I who am the poet, the writer, the narrator.
I who have wrote a poem that I thought would be accepted by you!
And what does your recycle bin contain in its dark depths – remnants of emotions, imagination and memories? Vestiges of lives that had gone by?
Sitting beside my window this summer that transpires into trajectories unknown, I can’t help but ruminate on the hidden depths of your recycle bin.
A poet , a failed one in that regard probing into the publisher’s mailbox , particularly his recycle bin seems to me a curious thought to gnaw at , this afternoon of a summer day.
From here, I could feel the wind caressing the dried blades of grass whose roots had gone deeper into the parched land. I recall to mind once again the story of the king of the forest who had fallen into a deep well.
He cried ….no, he roared.
No one heard him.
Or those who heard him walked away fixing their gazes on their rambling feet.
Do you know why no one came to his rescue?
Do you?
Because a lion’s cries do sound like his roars, loud and profound. Perhaps, a tad too much for the ear of the other to bear. Well, I wonder what made my train of thought meander through the fables and lores of the past. A lion in a deep well, a dove hunted by the hunter, a mouse trapped by a scheming cat …stories galore and so do memories.
In all those stories, tiny beings, those who are deemed forgettable save the mighty ones and therein lies the moral of the story , and I imbibed them long back.
It was one of those summer afternoons of bygone days where you take walks through the orchards to collect red cherries frolicking amidst drooping green leaves that I devoured stories like anything. For us, like every other kid too old to fall asleep to the hum of lullabies and too young to cross the highways of life, the sun was a bright red cherry, and the moon, a slice of rounded cheese, and the stories, the salt of our very own existences.
Younger ones were always scared of Aesop’s lions hiding behind big, tall trees.
They could always hear the muffled roar of a lion in deep wells that existed in the unknown lands of memories.
The elder ones were dreaming about going out into the world, to the “ best of times and to the worst of times”, to be a Pip , to be an Estella and never to be a Miss Havisham .
But , time stood still, like the waters of the dark green pond at the far end of the orchard.
I finally got a metaphor for your recycle bin , publisher unknown !
The murky, dark pond at the end of the orchard of my childhood summers…
A pond that let nothing to come up ever again, just like your recycle bin.
The pond that stayed silent in spite of the wafer-thin water striders skating across it…
In those days , screw pines held their roots firmly around the edges of the pond and dragonflies perched on their leaves , one behind the other. There was a wild beauty to the waters where fish, frogs, and mythical tortoises co-existed. The children used to throw stones into the waters, to see the pond come alive in a flicker of a moment only to hibernate into itself in the next second. Things used to go into the pond never to come up again – stones, sticks, rubber balls and dried up coconut shells .
Only the paper boats stayed afloat till the green waters absorbed them, first the letters and then, the papers.
Does this remind me of your recycle bin, dear publisher ?
Indeed!
What I have sent you a few weeks back , for your perusal were words from my childhood days spent under a scorching sun. I wish you go through the lines, once again.
At the outset it reads,
“A blackbird got trapped inside our house
That afternoon.
The children were scared …”
Well, I know for sure that there is nothing peculiar about the beginning lines of the poem. You may mistake it for prose as well, had there been no departure between the lines. Perhaps, this first impression would have cast my poem into the recycle bin of your mailbox forever. Yet, I was writing the truth, truth alone, undefiled by the passage of time .
I wish you could recall what the Grecian urn sang to the ears of the poet, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
Indeed, I was writing about the truth of a summer afternoon far removed by years of growing up and growing apart. It was our house painted in white, yet looking ragged like a damp cloth which has accumulated years of dirt and mundane moorings. I still remember the kitchen walls that were smeared with charcoal and the glass jars with broken lids.
Mundane it was !
Ordinary it was !
It was a house , supposed to be a home in the making . The mornings passed away in unison, whereas the nights screamed. The song of the cicadas had always been at odds with those of the frogs, the ancient dwellers of the pond, at the far end . And the blackbird dashed into our house in the afternoon of one such morning . It was trapped , literally and metaphorically , within the walls of the house and much later within the poem I have written .
“The children were scared”
Hope you noticed this. I was scared, we were scared, for I was not then, this failed poet who you know of as the crazed “ineffectual” woman sending you the same poem again and again incessantly and foolhardily. ( The one who wrote “ Hope is the Thing with Feathers” is also a woman, I reiterate.)
Let us read now, the rest of the lines once more.
“The bird flapped its wings incessantly
The electric fan was rotating fast
The bird shrieked
The bird cried …”
It was all about the bird. The house engulfed the bird. The noisy fan fanned its wings greedily. For a moment I thought the fan was too jealous of the bird , too jealous of its wings that are not tethered , too jealous of its flights, of its vitality.
We were scared of the bird, not about the bird, the truth be told.
Because we were children, with heaving little hearts.
The shrieking sound of the bird filled the room.
Its cries got louder and louder .
Its flights were strangulated by the brick walls. The windows were opened, but the bird couldn’t make out whether those were exits or entrances to two different worlds – an inner world of bricks, curtains, glasses and electric fans and an outer world of green ponds where screw pine flowers spread their fragrance.
Truth be told, I didn’t think this much then, for I was alien to convoluted thoughts and narratives because I was a child . These are all memories colored with emotion and sorrow.
Hence I meander, dear publisher. . .
Let us look into what I wrote next.
“It was my great grandma
Who could catch the bird
Without hurting,
Herself and the bird .
Every kid has a grandmother.
Some are even blessed to have a great grandmother and I was one among them . You too would have one, with wrinkled skin and grey hairs and unfathomable eyes . And it was my great grandmother who could catch the bird that day, without any fuss, without even battling an eyelid, the ailing old woman whose legacy I carry through time.
She pacified our trembling hearts. She held the bird in her palms with her long fingers stroking its feathers. The room finally withdrew into silence and calmness.
Trust me, it was only at that moment I realized the bird was not really black .
Its blue iridescence shone through and its eyes carried the colour of fire.
“ It’s Kakkathamburatti,” I still recall my grandmother’s fond voice.
She smiled at us, and at the bird. In her benevolent smile, she held us together in that moment where shadows began to fall and the sun was about to set for another day.
These are the ways of memory !
The tall trees beyond the windows fell their leaves in a current of the wind and somewhere in the distance , nestlings started crying. The children imagined their caps being adorned with the shimmering feathers of the bird.
Let victory be, glorious and shining!.
I thought of cutting its long tail, just to see how a tailless Kakkathamburatti would look like ! Don’t forget , I was a child then.
But our grandmother let the bird go, her fingers slowly lessening their grasp over the bird .
“It was she who alone
Could let it go….”
We saw the bird flying away, flapping its wings into the dark green edges of the orchard .
Much later, we saw her nestling close to the screw pine leaves , the creepers offering her a canopy over her head .
She never came back to us !
We too did not go in search of her and the pond had been filled up with sand and rubbles. The fish died. Frogs went away. Tortoises were not to be seen. Dragon flies wailed over the decimated screw pine flowers.
And Aesop’s lions hid their helplessness behind a fierce exterior.
Grandma too lay buried next to the pond.
Over her grows creepers and shrubs of unknown names. Beyond her, nothing grows but void.
Yet, she did come back to us.
She keeps on coming back to us, ever present in the silhouette of words and memories.
In the many voices we listen to and in the many stories we write about.
Her long fingers that caressed the black bird , her warm smile that touched our frozen hearts and her unwavering conviction in building up the home brick by brick are never to go unremembered. Hope you do agree with what I said just now.
She held us together , dear publisher.
And I go on writing about that summer afternoon of my childhood where in a quiet moment we were all held together by our grandma; the bird, the children, the house, the orchard and the wind howling across the land .
I may keep on writing till the world sees this truth behind the poem I sent you, till the moment you restore my lines from the recycle bin.
Much literary merit cannot be claimed for sure and in that regard, you are helpless and I understand your dilemma for you know not my grandmother, nor my childhood.
Yet for me, it’s all the truth I know and I have ever known…
Hence I keep on sending you my black bird and my grandmother, and the very summer afternoon that etched them in the vortex of my memory .
I am not able to let go…
“ It was she who alone
Could let it go….”
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References.
“ Ode on a Grecian Urn “by Keats
“Hope is the thing with Feathers” by Emily Dickinson
Mathew Arnold’s quote on Shelley in Essays in Criticism
