Poetry in the city.

[By Mayank Austen Soofi]

At the time, she was doing her Master’s (specialisation in ophthalmology) in coastal Pondicherry. One evening, after returning to her non-sea-facing apartment following another hectic day of work in the hospital, Dr Esha Jamal found herself intensely missing her smoggy polluted Delhi. She then did what came natural to her. She wrote a poem–Memories of a Delhi Afternoon.

That was more than two years ago. So much has happened since then. She lost her father, Hafiz Akram Jamal, to the second wave of the Covid. She herself has returned to her Delhi, and now works as an eye specialist in a hospital. Chatting this afternoon about poets and poetry, during a brief reprieve from patients in the OPD Room of Batra Hospital’s eye department, Dr Jamal gamely warns that “I have never won a poetry competition and haven’t had any of my poems published.” Even so, in her early 30s, she has lived with poems all her life. In her New Friends Colony home, she would often sat by “papa’s side, as he watched the mushairas of Urdu poets Wasim Barelvi and Rahat Indori on Zee Salam.” While her mother, Neelofer (BA in English Literature from Delhi University), built in her a fondness for the poets of other lands. “One day when I was 8 or 9, I remember reading the last stanza of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken scribbled on my cupboard’s door in ammi’s handwriting, and I remember standing still, struck with the poem’s beauty.”

The eye doctor agrees to share her aforementioned poem with us.

Memories of a Delhi afternoon

There are memories that I have
Of a time that has gone by
When life was simple
And emotions simpler

Of hazy summer days
The kind only Delhi can muster up
When the wind itself refuses
To stir things up
And a sort of silence
Tinged with a hint of melancholy
Settles into the crevices of the day

There, on a road shaded by Gulmohars and Neems
The quiet afternoon heaved a sigh of relief
And through it came those sellers of simple wares
The encompassing silence somehow
Mellowed their calls
To almost melodies
Perhaps the lilting notes of a flute
From the tall stack on a bicycle.
Or maybe some utensils
Or a wicker basket
That might be needed somewhere
A favourite was a small swing
For children to take a ride on
And sometimes some ice cream
For a treat that still seemed like one
Always a hint of excitement
That discovering something new brought forth

I remember thinking that the days were long
And that the afternoons extended
Limitlessly into dusk
But as time unfolded
Changes came to be
What was routine before
Slowly faded away
I still find myself waiting sometimes
For those quiet afternoons
When time trickled leisurely
And living seemed easier…

Poet in a doctor’s world

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