Editor’s Note
Most of the poems I’m taken by are ones that end on a note of a striving towards something, a straining against something, on the precipice of some kind of a discovery or a transformation, or this intense feeling of having arrived somewhere. I was surprised, then, when I found myself pulled towards Prithvi Pudhiarkar’s poems, especially for their endings.
Take, for instance, the ending of ‘Monsoon Break’. The final lines declare: ‘the attendant/ has given up trying/ and sits with his head bowed’. I was drawn to the lack of a fight in these lines, to the giving up. I was amazed too that the poet didn’t feel the need to substantiate, to say something strictly finalistic. Notice, too, the lack of punctuation in this poem as if the use of a full-stop might be too violent a gesture. I began to wonder: what is the poetics of gentle yet effective endings? Endings that are not a kick in the gut but a tender settling on the skin? Endings that don’t embrace a kind of striving as the only way to be but allow, truly allow, the poem to find its own direction?
—Kunjana Parashar
The Bombay Literary Magazine
the pool attendant’s main job
is to keep the pigeons away
from the water again and again
and again in the afternoons
today however the sun is under
a handkerchief of rain clouds
and hundreds of thirsty birds
drop in droves from the sky
straight to the edge of the pool
forming an interminable crowd
the attendant
has given up trying
and sits with his head bowed
I wish to be spoken
highly of —
edible and ready to mingle,
displayed
on the fisherwoman’s
steel plate
along with pomfret,
bombil, mussels and prawns.
I want her to explain
how fresh I am,
almost alive —
how nice it will be
if you take me home
at a price that works
for all of us —
and hack my limbs,
pull my intestines out
and throw it to the cat
with my eyes
before stuffing me
into a black bag
so that I could be food
or go bad;
my life a dream
I no longer have to live —
before someone
brings me home,
rubs spices
into the gashes in my sides,
lets me shimmer
in hot oil,
filling a kitchen
with the otherworldly smells
that made me —
before someone goes
to bed
full from my flesh
dreaming the dreams
I once thought
permanent.
our attention
is a very smart thing because
it has the whole might
of the body behind it
notice how
every time a man wearing
a crown of some kind
shows up
on a stage and says
something corny, grandiose
or sage, something old
inside us yawns,
slinks away to better rooms
while our eyes
shut decisively tight
as if nobody is speaking at all
our attention
knowing what it’s like
to be moved
folds its wingspan in half
and recedes into silk
waiting
to be awoken into flight
Acknowledgements
Image credits: Elena Petrovna Samokysh-Sudkovskaya (1863-1924). (Eugene) Onegin in His Study (1918). Image, courtesy Wiki Commons.
There is nothing in Prithvi’s poem about 19th-century white dudes polishing their fingernails or Pushkin’s hero Eugene Onegin from his eponymous novel. So what gives, as Americans like to say, hooking their thumbs in their carpenter dungarees. There is a reading of Prithvi’s poems however, that can be centred on the idea of “superfluity”. We have all heard of Narcissus, who rendered the world superfluous. Less well known is the story of his twin, Eugene Onegin, who was rendered superfluous by the world. Onegin was the prototype for Russian Literature’s “superfluous man”: well-educated, privileged, and possessed of a fine sensibility, but unable to make any mark on the world. In Prithvi’s first poem, the young attendant withdraws his attention from the world; in the second, the narrator craves to be the focus of attention; and the third is a meditation on attending to how we withdraw. Perhaps there is more of Eugene Onegin in all of us than we might like to admit. There he sits, by the pool, at the kitchen table, in front of the podium, surrounded by mirrors of every kind and yet incident on none.
Author | Prithvi Pudhiarkar
Prithvi Pudhiarkar lives and writes in Kandivali (East), Mumbai. His fiction, essays, and poems have appeared in Himal, Berfrois, Nether, The Helter Skelter Anthology of New Writing and The Penguin Book Of Indian Poets. These days, he writes online at Prithvi’s Travelling Circus, on Substack, while working on his debut collection of essays.
