Editor's Note
When I read poems that evoke a child’s relationship with their father, my mind often goes to Seamus Heaney. His metaphorical flourish in ‘Digging’ tenuously connects the act of digging to the creative act and draws out his connection with his father and grandfather. Heaney makes a greater case for the inheritances of a child from his father in ‘Follower’ where the boy who kept following his father in the field comes to the realization that now it is the father ‘who keeps stumbling/ Behind … and will not go away.’
It is this lingering sense of a father’s presence, in his absence, that Navneet Bhullar captures effectively in her suite of poems—In the sound of a raincoat ‘crunching in the rain’, in the twilight’s ‘sleight of hand’, and in the sky’s explosion following ‘the violence of cremation’. And, even in a friend’s father who selflessly walks barefoot in the rain so that his child’s feet remain protected. These inheritances are not external either, they live on in the children—the daughter people-watching and eavesdropping ‘Dad-like’, and in the brother’s insistence that his sister should ‘sit right.’
The absent presence of the father is the loudest in the strategically placed, uniquely capitalized ‘Silence’ in Bhullar’s poem ‘Pyre’, a silence left behind after the pyre burns down and before darkness takes over.
— Aswin Vijayan
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Daddy’s Raincoat
I stand sheltering in the hospital doorway with a crowd of patients’companions as the rain carries on rippling the new pool down by the foot of the stairway. A cheerful woman doctor with patchy wet bottoms accepts a folded umbrella from an arm through a car window and comes up to hand it to a man standing with me. He, the passenger, does not open the umbrella and dashes down the slippery steps to his ride.
A woman on a scooter fastens her raincoat over her chest, letting her legs take the rain wash. My blue raincoat from school flashes to me just then. The thick shine of it. The folding into my brown school bag with its thick buckles. The blue raincoat crunching in the rain. Its stiff hood. I am in class seven. Daddy has bought me a peacock blue raincoat. The woman on the scooter is driving away.
The rain pool is deeper when I see Kiran’s father in the shed by the tea shop. I have accompanied them to see her doctors. I raise my taut hand like a traffic policeman’s, moving it to and fro to tell them to stay there. I am trying to call our waiting taxi to ferry them to the next building.
This, my father’s gesture: a raised hand at chest level, sinewy forearm folded and still. Gesture at the school gate. Beneath the bus window. By the badminton court as I played my only tournament.
Or, across the airport glass wall past midnight, the gesture meant all was fine. Simple. It may be a question Daddy was asking, head tilted slightly – all boarded? Then saying “I am fine” and now the hand with four waves, leaving to take the bus to the station to wait several hours for the morning train. Me walking towards the boarding gate, with easy sadness to people-watch and eavesdrop Dad-like (but I did not notice this inheritance then), then perhaps to read the Delhi Times of India Daddy bought at the train station.
The sweetness of living swept by time, now word sprays from an ephemeral rainy afternoon. Kiran is in her wheelchair, her father pushing her through the deep rain pool towards the next building to see the doctor. I see later when I meet them by the taxi that he has been barefoot in the rain pool. I see that Kiran has his white shoes under her feet on the wheelchair footrest. I see Kiran’s head has a white kerchief her father must have tied. Rain cap.
monsoon wind sprays through
Dad’s windows enhance my night
a pane is broken
February in August
Through the crosshairs
of the window’s grills
in quick sleight of hand
the twilight turned
orange to pink to purple and
kneeling into the sofa back,
I thought of your last view
outside the window
years before the birds’
pre-requiem caws and squeals
moved you to smile right here
that final February evening.
As the slice of sky slid colours
our mango tree branch swayed a
hello
I am right here
I hold you.
Mum was cooking.
She did not hear me call her
to feel this.
When I was done
capturing the sky’s switch of colour
in wrong words
and two vacuous photos,
my brother, who has never
seen me kneel thus,
insisted I sit right.
Pyre
the sky exploded
with the violence of cremation
heavy drops of our shared coconut oil
. spilled all my kisses to your wet face
then your soft hair.
Silence.
then darkness
after the pyre.
11 pm the caretaker said
. the fire stopped at 11pm
then darkness
the silent mornings come black now
Acknowledgments
Image credits: Derived from photograph by Harun Tan. Uomo Seduto Su Una Sedia A Guardare Fuori Dalla Finestra Man Sitting On A Chair Looking Out The Window), via pexles.com
Author | NAVNEET BHULLAR
NAVNEET BHULLAR is a doctor, climate activist, and caregiver. Her poetry and essays have been published in Otherwise magazine, Cagibi, Citron Review, Peregrine Journal and elsewhere. Her writing wrestles with highlighting the human and the personal as capitalism tramples over lives and ecosystems. She is working on a memoir in essays on caregiving while fighting ecocide by plastic pollution. Navneet can be reached by email to areenmd@yahoo.com.