Poetry in the city.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Sometimes Kundan Kumar Singh is filled up with confidence-shattering self-doubt. Not because his wife tells him “What will you get from these poems” but because he feels that “Anybody can write the kind of poems I write!”

After all, doesn’t poetry come to him too easily? Isn’t it true he often rustles out first drafts during casual walks to the bazaar?

But then there are some kind friends who assure him that his poems indeed touch their hearts.

A museum curator in Central Delhi during the day, Mr Singh, 38, is a devotee of Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’, and like that eminent poet and essayist, he grew up in Bihar. But it is Delhi that became his muse, if in unflattering ways. “Our city has so much negativity,” Mr Singh says in his smooth, easy-going tone. “There’s so much back-biting here… people are constantly pulling down each other…. I wanted to get away from this toxicity and so I started to write poems.”

Although many of his poems minutely examine “the texture of pain and grief in life”, Mr Singh is defensive about his own life, asserting that he is no victim of any tragic melodrama.

Opening a drawer, the curator-poet shows The Delhi Walla a sheaf of printed papers — his entire oeuvre for now. A few of these poems are scribbled over with handwritten corrections. “Sometimes I keep on refining even those poems that I have already posted on Facebook,” he says wondrously, as if implying that putting up his work on social media is as sacred as publishing it in a book.

Mr Singh shares his new Hindi poem ‘Zakhm Bhar Jane Do’ with me.

Let the wounds heal

I’m leaving the village
Body with bruises pillaged
Let the wounds live
Love let it spring
Paths with traps are rigged
No thorns but feet are nicked
Let the torments rain
Beloved let it in
Each day brings an uproar
Quiet winds usher furore
Bring on the storm
Let it leave adorned
Where words make verse
On lips sit soul songs
Let it gush forth
Let it gather force

Where it pours every season
Tears well up day night
Let the sky clear up
Let it leave nothing dry
Where east and west unite
And sky embraces earth
For that place let me leave
Let the wounds heal

(Translated from Hindi by Pooja Sharma)

A poet’s wounds

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