Book Review: When God is a Traveller

Book: When God is a Traveller

Author: Arundhathi Subramaniam

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 103

Price: Rs 399

When I asked the poet, "What if I called you a modern-day Meera, an agnostic follower of an elusive Krishna?" she laughed, not displeased, but pointed out that her poems also had references to Shiva, Kartikeya and others.
Though the poems in When God is a Traveller frequently dwell upon the minute details of everyday life, they also see in those details, hints of a Godhead, an uber-reality. Charmingly elusive avatars of Muruga, Krishna and other divinities appear, composed of the elements of our contemporary reality and occasionally, denied by it. This is also a frank volume of middle age. In 'Epigrams for Life after Forty', Arundhathi Subramaniam eloquently describes how, when life swivels around suddenly, we have to learn to discover profits in our loss.

This is a theme not unrelated to Meera's: how to lose Earthly kingdoms, but gain the (divine) self. As Subramaniam puts it, "Bhakti (devotion) is very much the spirit of these poems — a passionate, far from anti-carnal or anti-intellectual bhakti. I think we've often turned devotion into an anaemic animal."

This bhakti in her poems also reflects a transition in her life since I was last in touch with her, in the 1990s. "Earlier I thought that my public persona would be about 'the Arts', and my private self would be about 'spirituality'. A near-death experience in 1997 and an encounter with a spiritual guide in 2004 have shaped my life on a very fundamental level."

Many of the old divides blasted away, and the poems in this volume reflect that. But what about the other divide: that between the poet and the reader? "Some would view you as a high-intellectual. How accessible do you think your poems are?"

Subramaniam recalls that when she was 13, she stumbled across a volume of TS Eliot's poems. She did not understand all of it, but "I knew I was in the presence of beauty, and mystery." She didn't know who Eliot was. For the 13-year-old, he was her discovery.

"We all want mystery as much as we want clarity. There is beauty — and truth — in the patterning of the two. Hundred-watt radiance is fine for shopping malls, not for poems!"

Subramaniam adds that she loves Randall Jarrell's comment, that people haven't stopped reading modern poetry because it's difficult: they find it difficult because they've stopped reading it.

So, how do the poems in this volume score on accessibility? Very well for poetry-lovers. For other readers, there's ample beauty of clear song here, but also some dark, cob-webbed corners that could do with greater clarity. To give the poet the last word on this, "I've learnt to trust the image and the image is much more intelligent than I am."

And indeed, Subramaniam produces many striking images:

... the sacred plunge into a Cadbury's Five Star bar, Kanchenjunga, kisses bluer than the Adriatic, honeystain of sunlight on temple wall, a moon-lathered Parthenon...

Other images are more intimate:

I'm wearing my mother's sari, her blood group, her osteo-arthritic knee.

Or, in 'The Dark Night of Kitchen Sinks':

...knives and spoons scattered, like mutilated limbs ...

A recurring theme that remains throughout is that of spiritual exploration, the repercussions of which can give rise to "a sense of terror and also of authorship".

When God is a Traveller is studded with gems of language. It is not necessary that all the gems will shine at once — or at all. Some may never shine for you (could they be blemished?) Others will reveal themselves in modesty, or in time. But you're likely to find at least one or two that go off like an explosion: an explosion that may help launch you, like:

...a tadpole among the stars,

unafraid to plunge deeper

if it must –only if it must –

into transit.