The Consolation of Ruins: Five Poems by Paromita Patranobish
Photo: Karan Madhok
Poetry: ‘I learned what we / Have always known: / Continuity is the story / We tell ourselves to / Staunch the cracked / And broken skin of time.’
Summer in Shimla
All summer it rained.
At night cicadas strung
their songs to ridges,
Made love in orchestral hammocks
and music to my mourning.
Taxis dragged the
weight of hearts on
wet slopes and crumpled rhododendron
Shielded by drapes of
downpour mixed with smoke
I sat inside cradling
emptiness and bones
Gazing at asbestos glistening
Absently through drenched panes
Hailstones struck the roof
angry as shrapnel,
When they reached the ground
They became conifers
I envied them the miracle of
Their shedding
We climbed like an
Eyeless engine
Led by the sound of thunder.
The sun slipped out
of gravestones
of gold-fringed clouds to
Where I stowed unnamed
parts among my things
And became a ceremony
The mountains burned,
Or maybe just the mist
I expected condensation
But the edges of the
Valley were walls of
of a parched alabaster urn
The air in my lungs
Was ashen—In its fugal light
I uncoiled the stillborn
muscle in my chest
Laying it to rest in silence
Under the silkscreen
of blinking stars, the earth
was deciduous
At dinner they told us
About wine made from rhododendron,
I drained my glass
In the marble sink
and watched it blush
We warmed our feet
By fragrant crackling logs
Watched the embers glow
And gently die,
Astonished at beauty’s capacity
To coexist with unbearable pain
Not knowing where one
Ended and the other began.
An orchestra of stars
glistened through gaps
In the sky, in a dark wild
Foliage cicadas held the refrain.
Soil teemed with ladybugs.
We laboured up
In hiking boots
Through needles of
Slippery pine
As sunlight warmed our backs,
Purple flowers shot out
Like fireworks through
Stones, through the trees,
The mountain rose
Undulating, rugged
Devastatingly remote.
Nimbly we walked, guests
Of its impenetrable, ancient geology.
Between langorous trees
I gazed at the snow
On distant peaks
The Dhauladhar, a bed of diamonds
Luring us to daring trespass,
Hill goats grazed on
Lichens by our side
Their cowbells
A minor scale running through
The mountain’s monumental song.
Rain came back
Pelting the colonnades,
We ran down the Ridge
Clutching backpacks, history
And the birth of healing.
*
The Consolation of Ruins
All day it weaves
A sunlit shroud
Winter, upon peeling walls.
What is a house
Without inhabitants?
Ghost town, wasteland
Greenhouse of curious botany,
A wilderness of what we’ve shed
In haste or indifference,
Wordless metaphor for
A ceaseless desertion of
The heart.
Unclaimed it waits
With its litany of unwanted
Wares, a fossil
Carved of time and human hands,
Beetles climb its
Tapestry of cracks
Moths molt behind panes,
On a rafter unseen
Bursts open a sparrow’s egg.
There’s nothing still in
This cosmos of
Scattered anonymity.
Time’s abundant ecology
Spins stories here
Of the subtle art
Of persistence,
Strange collaborations of
homelessness, and homes made
In secrecy and stealth,
The vagrant dust that waltzes
In sunbeams, and the
Other dust that settles
In quiet repose,
Making of what belongs no more
A semblance of permanence,
Only to ask
How shall we live
In the earth’s broken corners,
Build lodgings in its
Deserted interstices,
How shall we speak
In the mute atmosphere
Of nameless things?
*
Rainy Days and Mondays
(A Tribute to Karen Carpenter)
Where I lived
It rained often and hard
Large drops lashing the
Tops of trees with
The arrogance of stones.
In your song you
Declared universal war
On rain, but to
Me, rain was shelter
And cleansing,
The anger that I
Pressed hard with skeletal
Fingers till it turned
Pale, rain to me
In those feverish years
Was the choreography of its release.
How was I to know
That rain was your melancholy
Metaphor for cruel incongruities
Between freedom and familiarity
“Sometimes I’d like to quit
Nothin’ ever seems to fit”
Absorbed in melody
I failed to hear
Your words.
Afternoons were the quietest
The silence of orchestrated
Siestas broken by
Solitary birdsong,
The cassette settled effortlessly
Into the deck
Of my silver Walkman,
Unrolling, the black tape
My magnetic magic carpet
Drew me through
Sound waves and continents
To where you stood
Radiant in concert clothes
The smile never leaving
Your face.
In your songs the
Smile only partly pervades
A deeper darkness,
And so singing with you
I questioned the logic
Of love that hurts
And power that surrenders.
You spoke of masquerading
Intentions and unbroken
Loneliness, of a heart
Breaking, you recorded the
Precise moment.
In your words breathed
the poetry of
the world’s misunderstood,
Living in makeshift quarters
Between the weight
of flesh and the
Mind’s incandescence.
Mirrors made us both
Anxious, and we dreamed
Of splitting moth like
From the crysallis of
Selves wrapped in skin
“So let me go, I must be free.”
Yet I danced to your
Songs, twirling to your
Euphoria “lookin’ down on creation.”
Bleached with the
Acid of pain
Your hope for change
Was not pure but clarified,
You were your alchemy.
I am older now
Than when you died
Suddenly, at the cusp
Of a different life.
When I hum your songs
Sometimes in the
Middle of ordinary things
I think of the girl with
the silver cassette player,
Without pity, and as you
Would have written in
One of your songs,
Tenderly, a sojourner
Whose struggle was a
Journey where many roads
Met, even yours.
In the overlapping crossroads
Of years and passages
I hear your voice
Lingering in the wind
“Or leave the life we’ve made behind
And make another start.”
*
An Ode to Missing Photographs
I got my first
Kodak at fifteen
My lightweight matte
Black plastic companion
For five years
An introvert’s window
Into the world’s throbbing pulse.
I lost my first set
Of possessions at eighteen
Two cardboard boxes
Stuffed to the brim
With a hoarder’s bric-a-brac
And I learned my first
Painful lesson in evanescence.
Had you told me
Of matter’s fragility then,
I'd have laughed.
Part of the innocence
Of our early life
Is this foolish faith in
The persistence of solid things.
As an older woman
Studying the art of narrative
Mastering the art of losing,
Sneezing between bookshelves
And dusty archives
I learned what we
Have always known:
Continuity is the story
We tell ourselves to
Staunch the cracked
And broken skin of time.
Floods, separations, and fires
Lost homes, empty rooms
The melancholy of love
Fractured by time zones,
An endless
Wandering, the hum
And whirr of movement
Death and estrangement,
You learn to make
Difficult peace with disappearance,
Afterall (you console yourself)
Even breath is nothing
But relentless vanishing.
To seek a different
Rhythm of stable assurances
must have been
Futility like the first
Roll of Kodak
That came back
From the studio in
A shiny yellow cover
A false testament of forever.
They say our bodies
Remember what the
Busy mind forgets,
Yet, sometimes, despite
The startling power of recollection
That can in a moment’s
Provocation uncork the
Vessel of time,
I long for those
Faded prints and
Analog traces
The ambition and addiction
To make of inchoate life
A lasting stillness.
*
Art in the Times of Despair
To have vacated our
Worded landscapes
and taken
Refuge in silence
Exiles from those uses
Of love, language, and belonging
We can no longer bear.
To write under the black
Sun of sorrow
A tale without regrets
Or deliberate pathos
To write without self-disclosure
Or self-transcendence
The solitary sentence
Saturated with experience.
When the map is
Burnt to cinders,
To navigate under the mind’s
Tentative flickering starlight
The paths we learned to
Engrave like birth lines
On our hearts.
There is an art that
Like an empty
Spider’s nest in winter
sways, strung with
Moonlit dew, wind
In its silken maze.
An art of paradox
Like rays that bend
When a surface shifts,
Of humour making
A fist against
despair’s swirling wave.
There is an art
That thrives in life’s
Frozen places,
The wildflowers of the Tundra
Making of barrenness
A poem.
***
Paromita Patranobish is an independent researcher based in Delhi, moving between academic and creative interests. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf, and has taught in SNU, Daulat Ram College and Ambedkar University Delhi. When not teaching or writing, she loves to spend time with her camera and telescope doing amateur photography and stargazing. You can find her on Twitter: @paromita33.
