Poetry in the city.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The one-room apartment is filled with books on poetry. There are paperbacks under the bed, too. The ashtray lies atop Jorges Luis Borges’s Poems of the Night. The writing table has a reading lamp, and the reading lamp has a kite’s feather. The only window gives a clear view of the setting sun. The bed is a mattress on the floor. There is also a typewriter.

One afternoon The Delhi Walla entered the home of poet Mantra Mukim in North Delhi’s Kamla Nagar. A Master’s student of English Literature in Delhi University, Mr Mukim writes poems in Hindi and English. Some of them can be accessed on his blog along with photographs of streets and houses in the old quarters of cities. The blog is called ‘two feet later.‘ It is no co-incidence that the middle word resembles too strongly to ‘foot’, a unit of poetic rhythm. “The name implies both walking and poetry,” says Mr Mukim. “I love to walk. Most of my poems are about walking.”

Sometimes Mr Mukim walks all the way to Chandni Chowk, which is 7 miles away from his home. He is particularly fond of walking on Chhatra Marg in the University campus, but after dusk when the golden glow of street lamps gets entangled into the leafy landscapes of giant unwieldy trees.

“Poetry looks at familiar objects and makes them something else by filling them with layers of meanings,” says Mr Mantra. “Similarly, a street having all kinds of dissimilar signs and landmarks also appears as a text with many juxtapositions and metaphors.”

Mr Mantra shares his Hindi poem ‘Jagah se Pehele’ with us (the English translation, too, is by him). “I wrote it last year while going home in Bilaspur Rajdhani,” he says, referring to a long-distance express train. Mr Mantra grew up in the Central Indian town of Raipur, which–he says he discovered years later– is also home to his beloved poet Vinod Kumar Shukla.

जगह से पहले

जगह से पहले आते है
जगह को बवासीर
और स्वपनदोष
से रिक्त करने वाले
कुछ तिलस्मी नाम

जगह तब तक नही आती
जब तक यें नाम
दीवारों से उतरकर
ट्रेन में बैठे
किसी उतावले बिमल के
ज़हन में ना उतर जाए

जगह का भूगोल
गुप्त नामों
की एक मंडली है

अब जब स्टेशन आएगा भी
तो जगह नही आएगी
पूरी-पूरी
आएगा ज़हन कोई
भुला हुआ
भुलााया हुआ
जोड़ो का दर्द

Before

before the place arrives,
arrive certain magical names
that promise to cleanse
the place
of haemorrhoids. and
wet dreams

the place doesn’t arrive
until these names
jump off
the walls
to enter a curious Joe’s
conscience as
he sits at the train window

the geo-politics
of the place
is a bunch of
occult names

even now
when the place arrives,
it does only partially
and what arrives instead
in the conscience
is a forgotten –
deliberately neglected
some would say–
pain of one’s joints.

The dream palace of a poet-photographer

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