Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Jaideep Warya , Aurobindo Marg
Poetry in the city.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
Most people listen to songs on the FM during their commutes. But one late evening in south Delhi’s Aurobindo Marg, landscape architect Jaideep Warya was spotted reading a poetry book… inside his car! It was his father’s TS Eliot—almost every page was annotated with blue ink, making the copy look doubly precious.
In his early 30s, Mr Warya also writes poems. Fond of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, he shares one with us. It’s on rage. Detailing the back story of this particular composition, he wrote in an email, saying, “The poem was a way of exploring how our culture makes different demands on us than our human nature; anger emerges,sometimes out of nowhere and for no real reason. And yet our upbringing trains us to be polite, kind and, most importantly, civil. Some of us are better at doing this than others, as the current social and political climate around the world will demonstrate. But even those who succeed have to fight an almost daily battle to keep their anger and ill intentions towards others at bay, and probably always wonder if it’s worth the trouble.”
A Modern Sort of Anger
In anger, fury swallows me
whole, and inside it I reside,
till it implodes over time.
I may swear and I may threaten
to break-your-bloody-neck!…
but that far I never get. Instead
I end up wishing pain
upon you, not inflicting it.
I end up turning pale,
frustrated I cannot hurt you.
At worst I will ignore you,
or stare you down malignantly
(very, very malignantly)
if ever you attempt conversation.
Of course I won’t mind if someone
other than me hurts you,
That’ll please me greatly… I think… probably.
Don’t mistake this for fecklessness,
for trust me I seldom feel
any emotion other than glee
on ever seeing you in strife.
I delight in your every failure.
But you see this isn’t the age
of honor and duels-to-the-death.
Anger rarely achieves fruition.
Its crescendo muted, distorted
by meaningless fits of reason.
I’ll never raise a finger
(not even the middle one)
lest I offend you. Commitment
is too hard, even to hatred.
The situation is so pathetic
that I’ll be seething
and you won’t even know it.
You’ll just walk past,
maybe even smile at me,
and though I’ll want to curse I know
I’ll hold it back. Rest assured,
in my hatred of you, eventually,
the only person hurt
will be me.
Autobahn poet
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