The Delhi footpath second-hand book bazaar at Daryaganj is where I go, looking for a literary high. Poetry books are my favourite, and poets, I like to think, friends.
Like the 16th century Polish bard, some say the greatest Slav poet ever, Jan Kochanowski, who convinced me that our steady desire for wisdom has, as a rule, an abrupt and humiliating end, “Wisdom for me was castles in the air/ I’m hurled, like the rest, from the topmost chair,” and that to express emotions is to “bear humanly the human lot.” I found him sandwiched between two heavy law books on a rainy Monsoon Sunday.
Elsewhere, Israel’s modern poet who died 6 years ago, Yehuda Amichai, popped out of a pile of children’s books on a hot and dusty summer day to inform me that “Jerusalem is the Venice of God,” and that:
“God’s fate is now
the fate of trees rocks sun and moon
the ones they stopped worshipping
when they began to believe in God.”
Nearer home Daud Haider, the Bangladeshi poet who was exiled from his country in the 1980s for denouncing corruption and oppression, crawled from under the Lonely Planet travel guide books to say that in Bangladesh “There is revelry around/the palace of dead rulers…”
And now a few months ago I was gifted a pre-Independence edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s “My Boyhood Days” found by a friend looking for architecture books at Daryaganj.
The book is of average palm length, stamped, POEMS with a photograph of the poet at his table and replica of the poet’s signature singing the cover — Rabindranath Tagore —- penned in languid yet controlled loops. It’s a second edition, printed in 1943 by Visva Bharati, 2 College Square, Calcutta.. It’s first few pages are inked with the original owner’s stamp: Master Khursheed N Shroff, 3rd. Fl 141 Mody Street, Fort Bombay.
Does poetry lose its soul when pen is put to paper or letter to print, he asks, adding that he himself would have preferred to have lived in the age of Kalidasa and not the printing presses.
“Here I send you my poems
densely packed in this writing book
like a cage crowded with birds.
The blue space, the infinity around constellations,
through which flocked my verses,
is left outside.
Stars torn from the heart of the night,
and tightly knit into a chain
may fetch a high price
from some jeweler in the suburb of paradise,
but the gods would miss from it the ethereal value
of the divinely undefined.
Imagine a song suddenly flashing up like a flying fish,
from the silent depth of time!
Would you care to catch it in your net
and exhibit it in your glass vessel
among the swarm of captives?
In the expansive epoch of lordly leisure,
the poet read his poems day by day
before his bounteous sovereign,
when the spirit of the printing press was not there
to smear with black dumbness
the background of a resonant leisure,
alive with the natural accompaniment of the irreverent;
when the stanzas were not ranged into
perfect packets of alphabets,
to be silently swallowed.
Alas, the poems which were for the listening ears
are tied today as chained lines of slaves
before their masters of critical eyes, and banished into the greyness of tuneless papers,and those that are kissed by eternity
have lost their way into the publisher’s market.
For it is a desperate age of hurry and hustle
and the lyric muse has to take her journey
to her tryst of hearts
on trams and buses.
I sigh and wish that I had lived
in the golden age of Kalidasa,
that you were, — but what is the use of
wild and idle wishing?
I am hopelessly born in the age of the
busy printing press, — a belated Kalidasa,
and you, my love, are utterly modern.”
