Manohar Shetty

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The use of the ingenious hyperbolical simile has been raised to a delectable art by the English poets, Craig Raine and Christopher Reid. There’s even a name for it: ‘The Martian School of Poetry’, after a poem by Raine called A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, in which an alien, in honest and child-like bewilderment, sends back his report on Earth. I’ve never written a fullfledged ‘Martian’ poem, but I find that kind of imagination at work profoundly attractive.

A reviewer once complained that I was retreating further and further into the self, into an eventual state of aphasia. But before I’m condemned as an escapist recording the sound of his own heartbeats for an audience of one, I would like to let on that even in my most absent moments, I look at my world quizzically. Last year a poem came to me, unannounced and almost fully-formed, after a nerve-wracking fallow spell, and goodness me, it was all about Goa:

Stills from Baga Beach

Vast freckled Englishwomen
Pylon-limbed
Thaw in the sun. Their breasts
Loll out like baby
Sea lions.

Flabby leftovers of Valhalla
Diet on bread and bananas,
Their dozing blue eyes stroke
Small boys in torn
Pyjamas.

The German studies the Vedanta
In translation through chromax
Dark glasses, her oozing
Tattoo mobbed by
Bluebottles.

The temple elephant, vermilion
Swastika on its domed
Forehead, lumbers
Unblinking over the buff
Sands.

I don’t visit Baga and the other beaches of Bardez too often. Tourism has disfigured the place into facelessness. The shady invasion of the beach umbrella seems unstoppable. Every few yards, there’s a hotel, a boutique, a shopping centre and a beauty parlour —reminiscent of any city. My wife feels the degradation much more keenly — she has irretrievably lost the places of her childhood. At Anjuna, the flea market is a regular bazaar with stalls selling Rajasthani and Tibetan handicrafts. No one plays Bob Dylan here. But I don’t mean to be a killjoy. The seas are still relatively clean and the air eminently breathable. And when the breeze blows the coconut palms do sway. The dress code is very informal, but it is not recommended that visitors roam the streets in their underpants like some of the lager louts from England. And if you are into Goa trance and techno, the state’s latest large-scale export to the west, the place pulsates with it. ‘Adrenalinn drum-Xperimental Goa from Unnatural Recordings’; ‘Techossomy —Synthetic Flesh from Flying Rhino’; ‘Holy Mushroom from the High Society label’; ‘Trance psyberdelic from Moonshine’; ‘Deck Wizards Goa Gil-Kosmatrator from the Psychic deli label’— this is the new cosmic beat, born in Goa and exported to the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and Finland.

I’ve been to only one rave party and consider myself fortunate to be living out of earshot, in Dona Paula, near Panjim, in an eyrie of a house overlooking the Arabian Sea. The monitor lizard population has dwindled sharply and in their place stand luxurious bungalows, row houses and hotels, rising pellmell from the crushed pre-Cambrian rock. I live in an older, more orderly area, one of the pioneering settlements in the place. Dona Paula is filled with myth and legend. They do not stir me. I know them for what they are: tall tales for the gullible tourist. I prefer to watch from my balcony, at night, the radiant clockhands of the Aguada lighthouse scything through the sky, marking time. With each passing year, I feel a greater reluctance to visit the big city.

The historic lighthouse has not inspired a poem. But lately, I found myself examining a bunch of keys. Old, rusted, I don’t remember what doors and cupboards they once opened. But, unmistakably, I saw the stirring of a poem — a skeleton key that opened a doorway to the past and the present. A poem speaks for itself. Once written, it does not belong to its creator. Often, when I come across my old poems in anthologies and periodicals, I find myself wondering which person wrote them. This poem is too fresh in my mind for that otherworldly detachment. To me, it traverses both Bombay and Goa, and unlocks a part of my heart:

Anniversary Poem
A few click into place
From this ring of rusted keys
Like a child’s stick-drawing
Of the human race.

This one, brittle as nicotine-scarred
Teeth, unlocked photographs
Silverfished, sepia with age —
A schoolboy’s album of hills,

Lakes, embroidered gold
Colours on maroon blazers;
And that stray picture of a scrawny,
Long-haired creature

In a narcotic haze, dreaming
Of escape first into a neon
Forest, then into colliding
Waves, spindrift in the face.

But that flat iron key, its bit
A city skyline, opened doors
To a chain of empty rooms,
Cobwebbed calendars, uncleared bins,

Unread books, unwritten poems,
A young man’s wavering silhouette
At a darkened window, toxic eyes
On a key lost in a gunmetal sea.

The master-key that came, warm steel,
Fully rounded, sprung ajar a grey
Shutter to sunlit waves, arms, hands,
Gentle as clouds, shutting down

Room after empty room.

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