Paalai

In every parting there is an image of death
- George Eliot

The fifth landscape of Paalai is the setting for that phase of love that involves parting, separation and the ensuing hardships. The Paalai tree itself is rather unique in that it is unaffected by drought. The first (summer, mid day) and the native elements (the war goddess Korravai, dove, eagle, fatigued elephant, wolf, lizard, cactus, waterless wells, stagnant water, way farers and bandits) of this desolate and arid landscape provide the poet with a dark palette of emotive strands. The distance that separates the characters in these poems is not just physical but also emotional.

“Paalai has no specific location for it is thought that any mountain or forest may be parched to a wasteland in the heat of summer.” Hence it is not uncommon that Paalai poems have or start with elements of Kurinji or Mullai, lingering echoes of happier and more contented times, “mixing memory and desire”

In addition to the bleak and ominous elements of Paalai, its continuance and juxtaposition with the other landscapes give the poet wider scope and the means to insinuate the precise shade of emotion and accurate degree of contrast. Notes A K Ramanujan, “This fact adds further subtlety to the symbolism- Paalai associated with separation can happen even in the heart of union {Kurinji}” recalling W H Auden’s ‘ The desert sighs in the bed’

‘Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell’ says Emily Dickinson. Through such devices as mentioned above, the Kurunthokai poets lead us like Virgil through the concentric circles of the hell of abandonment, loss and desolation.

What She Sid

Will he remember, friend?
Where the curve of the parrot’s beak
holds a bright-lit neem
like the sharp glory
of a goldsmith’s nail
threading a coin of gold
for a new jewel,
he went across the black soil
and the cactus desert.

Will he remember?
- Altur Nanmullayar
Kurunthokai 67

A K Ramanujan in his commentary notes, “The goldsmith’s nail is the metaphor for a parrot’s beak, the metaphor knitting the festive preparations of civilization with the fruition of Nature.” However the richness of the metaphor lends itself to other interpretations as well. The precise needlework of the artisan’s craftsmanship and the delicate grasp of the golden-yellow neem fruit in the smooth, curved beaks of the parrot could symbolize the lover’s hold on the beloved, his or her own object of adoration. The cactus, a desert plant prickly to touch, would then mean a kind of ‘letting go’. The Tholkaapiyam’s recognition of touch as the most basic and predominant of senses, one that is shared by creatures across the spectrum of sentience -from the least sensitive grass, trees and creepers to the most sensitive humans and gods- adds weight to such a line of thought.

The economy of word usage that conventions impose, ensure that simple words, as in a prayer, are often suffused with a greater significance. The unitary nature of the neem (‘pazham’ used in its singular) and the gold coin (‘oru kaasu’) being threaded into a new jewel, on the occasion of a festival perhaps, reflect the mood of the heroine, that of “the denser solitude of festive nights”. This psychological insight into the heroine’s mindset echoes of the Jungian idea of loneliness, “It does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seems important to oneself, or from holding views which others find inadmissible.” The movement of the poem tracks the fate of the lovers, from union to separation, visually, in the way “the brilliant colours of the body of the poem are drained to the bleakness of the cactus desert by the end of the poem”. (A K Ramanujan, “Poems of Love and War”)

What Her Friend Said

Will he not really think of us
When he passes the clumps of milk-hedge
with their fragrant trunks
and hears the red-legged lizard call
to its mate
in cluckings that sound like
the highway robber’s fingernail testing the point of his iron arrow,

Will he not really think of us, friend?

- Paalai Padiya Perunkadunko
Kurunthokai 16


The poem brings together, in a startling manner, two images (or sounds)– the red legged lizard’s mating call and the bandit’s finger nails flicking the metal end of an arrow to ascertain its sharpness. Both images are firmly rooted in the landscape of paalai (native elements- eagle, lizard, wayfarers, bandits) but are not explicit evocations of the moods or anxieties of the heroine and the hero. The poet however, uses the contrast provided by the association of these images {through the voice of the narrator, the girl-friend} to push the poem towards its moment of crisis. It poises the poem for the wayfaring hero’s decision or reaction where a clucking noise on his journey could trigger in him either the reminiscences of his romantic association with the heroine or the more natural heightened watchfulness in the face of an imminent danger.

The starkness of the imagery is derived not just from the conjunction of the polar opposites of love and loss, but also through the signifiers themselves- the shrill, eerie call of the lizard and the pointed arrow-head.

The narration is sympathetic of the heroine’s lot (establishing the narrator as the girl-friend) in the way it subtly, though unreasonably, hopes for the hero’s remembrance of the heroine even when he is faced with the possibility of a threat, in the way it pits emotion against instinct.

The short poem abounds with symbols- fragrances, sounds and images that gradually and inexorably move the poem from a climate of hope and anticipation to despair and foreboding.

Drowning out the division bell

Nations, theorists say, are carved out on the lines of ethnicity, language and religion. It is along these very same lines that a divisive rectitude can be drawn, a separation that is becoming increasingly difficult to overcome.

Sports, like any activity, is forced to wear different garbs during different times. A casual exhibition of skill, even a getaway from the humdrum of daily life becomes a response, a call, a statement during periods of strife. An aesthetic phenomenon that, like a mathematical function closely approximating life, in extremity can become a voice – one that can rebel, one that can inspire hope and one that can unite and heal, in a way regimes and dictators and bullets cannot undo.

The playing field of the Olympics have been witness over the years to that extraordinary accent of sports, one that anyone, anywhere can understand.

“I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure”

The 1924 Paris Olympics saw the ‘Flying Scotsman’ Eric Liddle, the favourite for the 100m sprint, pull out of the event, for the heats were scheduled on the Sabbath day of Sunday. He competed instead in the 400 metre race, without any homework or specific training, and went on to win the event. The moment of gold was tinged with aspects of nationality and religion. Here was a loyal Scot racing for Great Britain, driven more by his fierce Miltonic belief in service to the Maker than pride and patriotic fervour.

The 1960 Olympics in Mexico saw the controversial “Black Power Salute” by two athletes of the United States of America, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, the gold and silver medallists respectively of the 200m sprint. While the American national anthem played, the athletes with bent heads and upraised, black-gloved arms called attention to the simmering black rights issues back home. They were subsequently pulled out of the US track and field team and eventually ostracized from the sport. Authority outmanoeuvred spirit, and the right-angled conduit of politics that call for regulated flow and obedient turns, contained the swell tide of protest.

Eleven seconds, you've got ten seconds, the countdown going on right now! Morrow, up to Silk. Five seconds left in the game. Do you believe in miracles? Yes!

Set in the frigid heights of the Cold War, the 1980 winter Olympics saw a hodgepodge team of amateurs and college students outgun the all-conquering might of the Soviet ice hockey team in a courageous display dubbed as the “Miracle on Ice.” Sports dared a bunch of kids to dream and to be intrepid. It asked them to compete, and harder still, to believe.

Muhammad Ali, the name that conjures pictures of coiled tension, hugging the rings and in a powerful unshackling of arrested fury, pounding a spent Foreman, walked with shivering limbs, wrecked by Parkinson’s disease. He lights the Olympics flare. He is retired and old. He still fights.

Jesse Owens ran to four gold medals amidst flag-waving, superiority-arrogating, Nazi-saluting Germans in the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Boxers from Cuba repeatedly shrug the professional boxing fraternity and its promise of money and renown to participate exclusively in the Olympics with relative anonymity.

Ladies and gentlemen, here is the result of event 9, the one mile: 1^st, No 41, R G Bannister...The time was 3...

On a rainy, blustery day in 1954, Roger Bannister redefined the world of athletics by running the mile in under four minutes. The bloody-minded traversal of a distance by one man in record time was more than a mere statistic. It opened up possibilities. It taught people to disregard limitations and scorn the impossible. The run that broke the barrier that was deemed beyond human potential was a pathway from the struggles of competing, winning and losing to a fount of contentment. "No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed." he said on completing the run.

In April 2007, an Iraqi team comprising of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, sections that have been pitted against each other for centuries by rulers and religious zealots, won the Asia cup beating several favorites on the way. A desolate Iraqi landscape rang out with gun-fire, shots that were not a mark of defiance but of solidarity and celebration.

Friday 6 July 2001, at 18:12, mankind finally found the answer to the biggest question: “Yes, God exists”

Ivanisevic embarked on an improbable run to win the 2001 Wimbledon Championship. His aces it seemed were powered by the belief of a new nation waiting for a hero, waiting for its voice to be heard. His ground strokes echoed with the urgency and anguish of human cries from his war-torn homeland. He is the first wild card entrant and the lowest ranked player to win the Wimbledon; statistics that were drowned out by the screams of hysterical fans in Split that July day.

In Sarajevo, each night before the sirens for the air raids go off, a group of poets gather around to recite verse, fighting bullets with words and allaying gun shots with mellifluous phrases. Sports may not set right the inequities of life, or make up for losses, but it may help us forget them in a moment of shared joy, in the ripple of the ball in the net, in the anticipation of an appeal or in the trajectory of a lob.

"May you and Iraq live in freedom and victory, with no place for destroyers or killers. Your greatness will remain in the hearts of the Iraqi people, and your joy is stronger than the hate of the terrorists." said the Iraqi president to the football players after their epochal win. In a world where the contours of separation are stark and the border trenches run deep, sports might well be the adhesive that could hold us together. Maybe even the apparent pursuit of triviality can trace out in us tenets that affirm life, a feeble flame that has to be protected against the gale force of division and separatism.

On Anil Kumble's retirement

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words . I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use" Ernest Hemingway

Kumble was an oddity when he arrived at the scene on a wintry day in Manchester against England eighteen years ago. A bounding run up and frugal deviation resisted classification as a spinner. Batsmen considered him a medium pacer who predominantly brought the ball in, but that prognosis did not make playing him any easier. Critics and connoisseurs could not bear to talk of Kumble and the other great leg spinning talent of the era, whose traditional action, prodigious turn and rock star looks, in the same breath. Shane Warne could turn the ball on glass. His variety, and the control that his iron wrists exercised on them, earned him awe. He lured and baited the batsmen until they believed their dismissal was inevitable and poetic even. Kumble was everything Shane Warne was not. Kumble was a minimalist preferring application to flourish, accuracy and angles to drift, and gumption to genius. When Kumble was done with batsmen, they are left with only the distaste, almost crudity, of the instant of the dismissal, of how the ball did so little and did that little so jaggedly, with little reverence to grace and sublimity or to flight and loop, but how that little was always enough to deceive them in their designs. The precise orchestration leading up to the moment remains unknown to all but to the machinator and the applause that follows the performance is in keeping with the silence of the composition.

Be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions

Genius is instinctive, infallible and unchanging, is unaccustomed to struggles, a source of unfettered joy; attributes such as would be the undoing of normal, even talented sportsmen. Genius is a burden that would break their all too human backs. Kumble was no genius. Kumble’s methods were deliberate. His was not the way of the magic ball, the one delivery that the bowler conceives of and executes in a moment of genius or inspiration. He probed the batsmen with the persistence and irresistibility of an inquisitor until he culled out his answers. On his shoulders, ones that could bowl all day unmindful of the sapping heat, ones that could exact a response from the slow sub-continental wickets, rested India’s reputation as the fortress that visiting teams dreaded. Kumble did struggle and labour, especially against left-handers and in wickets abroad during the early part of his career. But each failure, each injury, changed his wises in a subtle way; a newer variation, a changed strategy, a development by degree. In the acceptance that beauty was a luxury his discipline did not allow, Kumble could will his body to be a non believer in the threshold of pain and his mind to ‘take no thought of the harvest, But only of proper sowing’ so much so that when he bowled with a bandaged jaw in Antigua, belted out an appeal, spat out blood and went back to his marker nobody found anything amiss

In the fullness of time that a long career offered the autodidact went on to achieve most major sporting honours, bowling India to victories in the West Indies, Pakistan, Australia and England, and captaining the country in has last 14 matches. In a country where passions are fanned by the bellows of a un-forebearing media, traits like restrain, contained aggression, grit and horse sense often take a second seat to the instant gratification that dash offers. Perhaps they bear too disquieting a resemblance to the modest drudgery and delayed fruition that everyday life entails. What of sport is art and what of art is spectacle and grandeur? What of art is visual delight and what of it is an appreciation of the larger pattern, of an idea struggling to find expression and its ultimate fulfillment? A keener appreciation of a body of work, especially of the kind that Kumble has conceived would require than the audience be bold enough to redefine its sensibilities in newer and broader ways.

Tired legs always seem to know the way home. So do wearied minds.

Like going up the bean stalk, I sometimes try and remember my earliest memory. The edges are blurred and indistinct, taking on the quality of a dream, that conduit of primal causes. May be it is wholly a dream and not a memory. I dream of it often with the trepidation of witnessing a prophecy fulfilling itself. It is as if the dream acquires a mass and velocity with age and repetition.

The mid afternoon sun is filtered by the skin of the boat. It is comfortably warm and the light is diffused inside. The sea is without waves and the vessel is steady. Amma is lying down at the back of the boat. She is feeling tired. She is pregnant. With me. Familiar, but fuzzy faces turn back to look at us. With each breath that she takes, I take in the intimacy and the changeless benevolence of the shelter. I drift back to dreamlessness.

Things are in repose, perfect equilibrium.

Anything that can happen after this can only be an anti climax, a dissonance. Birth. Life. Between the two sleeps, we are cast out, slithering awake, displaced, living our lives trying to chase and replicate a fast fading dream, for a swim in those tranquil waters. We never feel safe enough again to be tender to each other.

This evening, the train is on time and people move from the platform and into the train involuntarily like shifting from one side of the bed to the other without really waking up.

The fan puffs out hot gusts of air on selective locations. People make way without looking up not wanting to spoil their civility by getting acquainted. Inquests occur in silence, a wordless appraisal until glances meet and quickly turn away. How many ever get in, there always seems to be enough room for them and their silence. The silence displaces and asserts. There is something very urban about it. When its fabric stretches thin, what is visible underneath is only a misplaced irritation and disaffection.

The whistle blows and the passengers shift their glance testily from one speck on the floor to another. A photographer gets in and as the train crosses a bridge clicks pictures of the regular shadows on the orderly people. Almost everyone is dressed in muted shades. He seems dissatisfied and gets down soon. A bunch of giggling children in their sweat soaked uniforms stand next to the doorway. There are empty seats but they won’t sit. They are going home.

The Vaigai is an old river. On its banks, a long time ago, flourished an ancient civilization. Now on the river bed naked boys swim in puddles, cows graze, dhobis wash their clothes and hang them out on colorful lines. The river itself has shriveled into a tired stream that disappears into the sands.

The men sat around in blue foldable chairs under the pandhal, chatting without looking at each others faces and reading the tamil newspaper. Toddlers ran in and out of the house and the men looked at them with disapproval. The women welcomed the newer of the guests with a recounting of the events. With each narration, something of the spectacular was woven into the story. The guests remembered how the last time they saw him, the farewell had been very poignant and foreboding. The members of the family remembered with wonder how he had asked specifically for them a few minutes before he went to sleep.

It was Diwali eve and crackers were going off intermittently. “The whole city seems to be sending him off” someone in the crowd said.

There was a profusion of footwear trying to invade the house. I found the smell of incense and rose-petals oppressive. I moved into the next room.

Black and white photographs lined the wall. The first was a very old photograph of his mother in a fading frame. She was in the whites of a widow. She looked a little startled and posed for the camera in a stiff manner. There was a suggestion of the resolve of a single mother with seven kids to raise.

In the second he posed with four of his brothers. He was the smallest and hence stood at the front leaning shyly against a flower pot housing plastic flowers. His brothers were already in business and were probably doing well for themselves. They had an air of defiance and endeavor about them.

The next photograph was a handsome portrait of him in his mid twenties. He had his hair oiled and parted, face powdered and with an angavasthram on his shoulders. His fittings suggested the care and sensibilities of a young wife. He looked on at the camera, with the kindness and benevolence that the expectation of wealth brings. He was confident and forgiving. Perhaps the injustice he felt when he was deprived of the rightful share of his father’s property as a kid was already pardoned in a climate of charity that accompanies a respectable social standing.

He was then the patriarch around whom the family stood deferentially with folded hands. He was also the old man with his great grand daughter. She grinned cheekily while his eyes were glazed and unfocussed.

His final possessions were a thick pair of glasses and a few white shirts and veshtis. The space he occupied and commanded dropped off much like in the photographs.

The guests left his house that evening praising the hospitality and the precise adherence to the traditional rites. The family flew back to their respective homes.

Having stayed in hostels and other accommodations for the better part of the last seven years, I quite enjoyed the indifference to time and duty that a stay at home offered. A warm afternoon, I was in bed with a novel, half drowsy and distracted, mainly because I could not summon any intent.

The door creaked open and I was startled out of a slushy sleep into which I was slipping. It was the maid with a bucket of dirty grey water and a wet cloth which was all that was left of an old tee shirt of mine. I was not using it anymore, but I was nonetheless annoyed that amma would give away my old stuff without asking me about it.

“Raakesh, I need to scrub the room. Can you stay in the other room for a few minutes?” she half smiled, half requested. She had worked for us a long time back, left for a few years in between before coming back. The familiarity with which she used my name was vaguely irritating.

“Sweep around the bed and finish the rest tomorrow” I said picking up the book again.

“Fine” she said and set the bucket down. The splashing and the scraping was beginning to get on my nerve and I was also having difficulty figuring out where exactly I had stopped reading.

“Raakesh, what exactly are you studying to become?”

“Computer engineer” I lied, lacking the patience and the inclination to explain to her what an MBA was.

“You stay in a hostel don’t you? What does your monthly expenditure come to?”

I sighed audibly and tossed her what I thought would be an inoffensive figure “Around two thousand rupees I guess”

“Oh, my daughter is doing her MBBS in Chennai. She asks me for five thousand rupees a month. You think she is wasteful?”

I was both vexed and shamed that she knew a little more about education than I’d given her credit for.

“Well, Chennai is an expensive city. Maybe she is doing her best”.

From what I knew of medical school, it was quite an expensive thing. I half sat up so that I could see her better. She was wearing a cheap saree and except for a nose ring, which was too bright to be gold, she was bare of ornaments.

She suddenly looked up “Why! She is as old as you are”, she smiled, “and my elder son, he would be as old as Vaishu”. Vaishu was my elder sister. She paused, turned her face down and started scrubbing again.

Not knowing what the appropriate response was, I ventured “So what does he do?”

“He is like his father. That wretch is bent on destroying himself.” She dragged the wet cloth from side to side and was panting with the effort. Maybe she did not want to talk. I put the book down.

“He runs away with the saved up money for days at a time. The neighbors say he will be back when the money runs out. But each time he is back he looks like death. He is very sick and his arms have the marks of needles. His father was better that way. He went away and never came back” She involuntarily touched her ear, where a ring would have been.

She was scrubbing all the while and labored to get her breath back.

“Cant work like before” she smiled.

“Couldn’t you ask someone for help?” I did not bother to think if the earnest question sounded in poor taste

“Yes, I summoned enough courage once. There is a cousin. She is rich. Their house has a watchman you know! And two huge dogs! It felt very wrong standing there, with my torn saree, bothering them. I came back before the watchman could fetch a reply”

“Seri Raakesh, I am done here. I will switch the fan on now” she hauled off the bucket and the rag.

“Its fine, I will do it myself” I said in a week and futile gesture, sitting up. She’d already switched it on and moved out of the room by then.