No Part Time Dreamer

No Part-Time Dreamer: A review of Anju Makhija’s New & Selected Poems by Debasish Lahiri

Changing, Unchanging: 
New & Selected Poems (1995-2023),
Anju Makhija
Red River, New Delhi,
ISBN-13 978-8197859236
168 pages     INR 399/$ 14.99

Anju Makhija’s voice in Changing, Unchanging is unrelenting. It does not allow the reader an easy retreat into the haven of beautiful images. It compels them to recognize that the perception of the ‘beautiful’ is evanescent, at best, caught as it is among moments that can range from the terrible and sordid to the routine and dull. Makhija’s articulation of reality, thus, seems a little ill-at-ease: neither lost in aesthetic rapture nor bedraggled by the meanness and squalor of the world of men. Her poetry is no low-ebb retreat. Instead, it is a restless and indefatigable attempt to rock every certainty, to prove that ‘beauty’ has its foundations in the mire and muck of cities and that the sky is often reflected in puddles and ditches in the slums of Dharavi (a district of Mumbai).

Two half legs,
splayed on concrete,
fast asleep.
The man in orange,
…
kneels
beside the body,
eyes towards the sun.
                                     (‘Another Marine Drive Morning’)

This poem is Makhija’s knowing doff of the hat towards Nissim Ezekiel, the great Indian Modernist poet and editor. It references Ezekiel’s poem ‘A Morning Walk’ where a poor man finds himself in the city of Mumbai “Where only human hands sell cheap” and asks the sun in the morning, “Why had it given him no light”.

The recent post-millennial history of Indian poetry in English has been that of the parergon – a kind of supplement that has ignored the ‘true matter’ (or Ergon in Greek classical thought) and concentrated on an ahistorical absorption of the seemingly unimportant or far-fetched set of western influences. Changing, Unchanging is a link, powerfully asserted, between the last decade of the twentieth century and our new millennium, between modernism and postmodernism in English poetry from India.

Makhija’s poems from the late-90s give off a heady Bombay-whiff. Their grounding in place is at once celebratory and critical. They feature well-known landmarks: the Marine Drive, Gateway of India where “knot by knot the island/ drifts into extinction”; Juhu Beach, Victoria Terminus where “the little boy” is “swept away with banana peels, every morning”; “shit-bits” in Dharavi; and local trains on the Harbour Line.

Makhija’s poems are passionate, irreverent, absorbed and hard-hitting, by turns. They puzzle us, shock us, placate us only to lull us with a false sense of tranquility before she swings the sledgehammer. In the poem ‘Social Work’ “dodging shit-bits in Dharavi” by day is followed by “cognac on the rocks” at night. Or, as Makhija writes in the poem ‘An Order for a New Head’,

Make the numbers even, enough odd ones.
Mould the skull with RDX plastique, the stick-fast variety.
Set the teeth firmly, rattling disturbs infants.
Keep the tonsils, I like to trap irritants for happy days. 
                                                                     

Makhija’s poetic trajectory often passes through the crests and troughs of paradox, analogy, appropriation of ancient sayings or the memories of high-art. She also makes use of repetition, symmetry, the occasional rhyme, and rhythm. She provides the clue to an appreciation of this element in her poetry at the end of a poem called ‘An Order for a New Head’

Get the picture?
I’m Lao-Tzu smiling at Mona Lisa.

Inaction meets the inscrutable. Poetry’s role in achieving such fragile, yet profound, stasis in a world of flux is powerfully invoked here. An elusive silhouette of the Tao Te Ching often surfaces in the poems. This is also the fuse that drives through Makhija’s poems from the new millennium. She is able to bring both the changing weather of human affairs and the unchanging weather of nature to a vivid, punctilious close:

Beaches have receded
like hair on balding heads.
…
Living once meant
being in the moment.
Now we seek blessings
Of divine elements.
                                                 (‘Approaching Matrimandir’)

Anju Makhija is no “part-time dreamer”; she dreams with her eyes wide open. It is an act of daring to preserve the beautiful in a world of “full-time schemers”.