Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Akhil Katyal’s Poem ‘He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur Farmhouse’, Jangpura Extension City Poetry by The Delhi Walla - February 14, 2017February 14, 20171 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 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 5a. 6. 7. FacebookX Related Related posts: Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Chaitanya Kaushik, Jangpura Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Asmaul Husna’s Poem City of Djinns I, Chanakyapuri Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Shahwar Kibria, South Extension-I Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Samia Mehraj’s Poem ‘The Runaway Girl’, Maidan Garhi Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Indrajit Ghoshal’s Poem on Coronavirus Lockdown, DLF Phase 3, Gurgaon
cute poem. I wish I had a guy with ‘Najafgarh arms’ or someone ‘who kissed me like Shalimar Bagh’. But I would like him to be neatly laid out like Lutyens’ Delhi and it would be great if he could smell like the Lodhi Gardens in spring. Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all!