The Hindu (Thiruvananthapuram)
Poems of love, life and country
Anupama Raju o‚ers up the quotidian and the quirky in equal measure in her second book of poems
The year is 1895. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, has just turned 60 and nds himself in terrible debt after a substantial investment in a failed invention: the Paige Compositor. To extricate himself from his money woes, he committed to a year-long world tour, his reminiscences of which would later come together in his travelogue Following the Equator, published in 1897. In January 1896, he landed in Mumbai, then Bombay, “a bewitching place, a bewildering place, an enchanting place — the Arabian Nights come again!”, he wrote about the city.
Anuradha Kumar’s latest novel, The Kidnapping of Mark Twain, is a vivid recreation of Twain’s version
In Anupama Raju’s second book of poems, Bitter Gourd, she puts the everyday, with all its attendant activities and emotions, under keen scrutiny, and what emerges is another angle to the quotidian.
Some lines spin soft yet strong visual images, like the ones that go:
…each time you call me mol
I’m as young as your Malayalam,
Tender as elaneer, soft as panji, Haunting as pulluvan paattu.
In ‘Table for One’, the poet wafts the loneliness, the quiet, the momentary awkwardness, over to the reader, who receives it in empathic silence. There is a decided cynical slant as when the poet states that:
Conditioners can condition Hair, skin, legs, breasts, vagina. But mostly screams which
Don’t leave a stunned mouth held shut by a knife.
This inherent cynicism reveals itself throughout the book. It’s a ght you started, she tells an of Bombay, a complex cosmopolitan city akin to London and New York with a sometimes-murky heart and an ancient soul. Into “this moving show this shining and shifting spectacle”, as Twain puts it, Kumar airdrops an unlikely detective duo, American Consul Henry Baker and the beautiful, mysterious Maya Barton.
Bitter Gourd: Poems
The Kidnapping of Mark Twain unknown protagonist. It will take us all down.
And elsewhere:
Pick up what’s left of me and make me
Into a country without love.
In a lovely little poem titled ‘What You Don’t Know’, the poet slips in a statement of quiet strength. I am an axe, she proudly states.
There is also a political note
Pacy thriller
The novel opens with the murder of a young woman called Casi, who is believed to have been killed by her husband, Tuka Ram, a labour supervisor at one of the city’s textile mills. Soon after, Twain and his family arrive in the city and are received by Henry, who as the American Consul, “had to ensure the Clemenses had a pleasant stay in Bombay, and wherever else they travelled to in India”. The next day, after a rather eventful party, Twain goes missing, so Maya and Henry team up to nd him; how they do, and what they encounter along the way, makes up the rest of the book.
The Kidnapping of Mark Twain is an action-packed, pacy roman policier, complete with homicides, a kidnapping, multiple antagonists and a detective duo with an unbalanced power dynamic, vaguely reminiscent of Conan Doyle’s Holmes-Watson, Agatha Christie’s Poirot-Hastings or Poe’s Auguste Dupin and his anonymous sidekick. But it is also a lot more. Studded with references to several signicant events from the 19th century, such as the long shadows cast by the British colonial enterprise, including their discriminatory policies and the start of the opium trade, the Oscar Wilde trial, the women’s reform movement and the implications of Bombay’s cotton mills on the city’s economy — it attempts to capture the zeitgeist of that era.
My only grouse, perhaps, is that there is far too much going on — several characters, convoluted sub-plots, commentaries on multiple social issues — which can be confusing and cause a reader to fumble at times. But Kumar’s masterful storytelling and skilled set-setting somehow propel you forward, as does the promise of the budding romance between Maya and Henry, a relationship as bewildering and complicated as the city it is set in. that threads itself through some poems, as when the poet wistfully tells the reader:
If you want to bring me something
today, bring me the republic I thought we will be some day!
The pragmatism that peeps through the book is of the gentle kind, a wry acknowledgement of how things won’t change all that much. When it comes to matters of the heart, the emotions swing this way and that. There is the grey dreariness of a love long gone, of a futile waiting. In contrast, there is the soft assertion of condence:
I’m the key to your door.
Stay closed.
Only I can open you.
Some of the poems don’t open themselves up too easily to readers, they need to stop, absorb, re-read a line, sigh over another line. Which makes it all the more rewarding for those who persist.
The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based author, journalist and manuscript editor.