Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Akhil Katyal's Poem 'He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse', Jangpura Extension

Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Akhil Katyal’s Poem ‘He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse’, Jangpura Extension

Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Akhil Katyal's Poem 'He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse', Jangpura Extension

Poetry in the city.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

He shares his second-floor flat with Agha Shahid Ali and they often sleep together. He has that deep bond with The Veiled Suite, the late Kashmiri poet’s collected poetry—the paperback is lying beside his pillow.

One evening The Delhi Walla meets poet Akhil Katyal at his apartment in Jangpura Extension. An assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Shiv Nadar University, Mr Katyal teaches poems by Agha Shahid Ali and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, among others.

With no disrespect to his writing table, it has to be admitted that Mr Katyal mostly writes on his bed (notice the laptop there in the photo 1 below). Explaining his private process of poetry writing, he says, “Every day you see things, you collect them. Some of them continue to linger, either in the form of a particular phrase or a line or just a feeling. At some point these become sufficiently ripe for you to turn it into something substantial. Which is to say you find a form for that initial burst of emotion, you find a mould for it. It is then that I start to type the words on my laptop and a poem starts coming into being. It is here that a poem is disciplined into shape, given a frame, a vehicle on whose back that emotion can now travel. When it works, it really works….”

One of Mr Katyal’s poems emerged out of his regular commutes towards South Delhi’s Chattarpur, familiar to most of us Delhiwallas as the place where the capital’s 1-percenters live amid the secluded luxuries of their sprawling farmhouses. Mr Katyal shares his poem ‘He Was as Arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse’ (apt title, sir!) with us. I see it as an ode to neighborhoods that make up a city, any city, anywhere in the world.

He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse

He was as arrogant as a
Chattarpur farmhouse but
in the end, I figured he was
just cluttered, like Adhchini.
Which I liked. Our beginnings
were rocky, we held hands,
infrequently, and uneasily,
like Def Col and Kotla,
but then, in some years,
often and more breezily,
like Jangpura & Jangpura
Extension. All those years,
of romance and apprehension,
he’d held me in his Najafgarh
arms and kissed me like
Shalimar Bagh. Not that we
didn’t fight like Rajouri,
crossing each other’s Civil
Lines, not that he wasn’t at
times distant like Greater
Noida, or quiet like Asola,
but always, when the worst
had passed, we returned at
last, to where we’d been, some
where near Dilshad Garden,
by the blessings of Nizamuddin.

The portrait of a poet as Jangpura Extension

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Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Akhil Katyal's Poem 'He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse', Jangpura Extension

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Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Akhil Katyal's Poem 'He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse', Jangpura Extension

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Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Akhil Katyal's Poem 'He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse', Jangpura Extension

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Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Akhil Katyal's Poem 'He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse', Jangpura Extension

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Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Akhil Katyal's Poem 'He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse', Jangpura Extension

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Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Akhil Katyal's Poem 'He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse', Jangpura Extension

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Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Akhil Katyal's Poem 'He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse', Jangpura Extension

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Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Akhil Katyal's Poem 'He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse', Jangpura Extension