On the refractive indices of words: The poetry of Sridala Swami
In his review of Sridala Swami’s collection Run for the Shadows (2021), Saurabh Sharma celebrates a poet whose ‘craft is like a prism, from which white light disperses into colourful bands’
Not long ago, I understood, for the first time, what the literati consider to be true poetry. A single poem changed me forever: Amrita Pritam’s “Mera Pata” (My Address). I didn’t know then that there were many ways to do words besides the prose in textbooks. Pritam’s verses, however, shook me up. Collection after collection, I drowned myself in her immersive poetry. I could experience the charm of smoke rings in several of her poems (even as a non-smoker in those days), the lostness that she often tried to convey, and the place of deep hurt where she wrote from.
The use of right words—an accurate mastery of language—can conjure up exacting imagery. This wordplay is especially consequential for poets. And Sridala Swami stands tall among the poets I’ve read: hardly anyone’s craft bears witness to this hypothesis, justifies it to its limit, and creates an experience of absolute surrender for the reader.
Published by Context, an imprint of Westland, Run for the Shadows (2021) is Swami’s third collection of poems after seven years.
In the first poem, “Dear Stranger Deciphering this Ancient Script”, Swami addresses a future being, to whom she writes that these poems or her words will mean nothing. Yet she wants this person to “keep them [her words] as you would a stone you picked to remember a place you visited.”
How does one write with such an inherent pessimism, yet be so confident, to share this hint of optimism that the work will survive? Still, there’s an anxiety, a glimmer of the pain of not knowing what will happen to one’s verses. This is much like the relationship with one’s parents, who stay with you for long enough, giving an illusion that they’ll stay forever. But they don’t. No one does. Not even the creator, arranger, and arbiter of words. I, too, felt this helplessness and a feeling of loss, connecting immediately with this hauntingly-designed hardback of the book that traverses multiverses within its covers.
This isn’t the only poem in which Swami has had immense fun at the futuristic. She is disturbed at the pace at which this dynamic world that we inhabit is evolving and destroying everything that one holds dear to oneself. A writer is often faced with an impending need to articulate this loss. For Swami, this is reflected in “Forensic Flowers”, where she takes jibes and invokes a demand for a newer language to name irreversible acts:
In the neologism of the future
we will need words for fossils formed
from compressed glass
and plastic on the beach
phrases for landfills of digital waste.
Eco-sensitivity collaborates with sarcasm in this poem to present an accurate picture of the reality facing us.
“Conquest of Paradise”, on the other hand, can easily be called an elegy. The paradise that the powerful demand should be protected from a perceived threat in this poem could be Kashmir, Palestine, or any other oppressed community, on the verge of being crushed by a bully state.
The way its words highlight the disgusting imbalance in power (“The two things [stone and bullet] are not equal and never have been: but conquerors have always known this”) shows how miscalculating junta is in the face of events that neatly position them in the ‘for’ or ‘against’ blocks, for these ‘conquerors’ know how “to pluck and keep a few” to “keep the enchantment alive.”
There’s immense beauty and grace in the way the poems in this collection culminate. It appears as if no effort was put in chiselling them to perfection. Poems like “Dream: Midnight” and “Blessing” are filled with a sublime and gut-wrenching power. I could hardly bear reading the prose poem “Rituals of Departure”; it transported me back to the time that I cannot forget: the summer of 2008 when I lost my father. And yet, I went back to these verses time and again. The “manner” of my father’s death’s “arrival” is something that has made him more alive in his passing.
[Swami] is disturbed at the pace at which this dynamic world that we inhabit is evolving, destroying everything that one holds dear to oneself. … she takes jibes and invokes a demand for a newer language to name irreversible acts.
“We were ravaged but we recovered,” Swami writes. I am unsure if she’s convinced of this. I am not, for perhaps my personal ravaging didn’t exit “quietly and in silence.” For me, the loss was like a massive power cut, bringing a city running unrestrained on electricity to a halt. Sometimes it takes forever to recover.
Swami plays with the idea of artists channeling unpleasant encounters and grief through their work in several poems in this collection. She writes in “The Muse Grief”:
Do you hate more the way you used your grief
to feed your muse and fuel your art
or do you hate the thing itself
without which there might have been
more ebb than flow in the clear waters
of your inspirations?
After having read this collection twice, I marvelled at Swami’s attentiveness; I wondered why she appeared so fully aware in her work, and how she was able to make such deft choices of language. I returned to the collection yet again to find a response. And here it was. On page 31. In the poem “The Refractive Indices of Words”:
The road between clarity
and obscurity
is paved with
the refractive indices of words.
This poem not only plays with the notion of interpretation, but also explains what renders different meanings to words. (It made me recall Amrita Pritam’s short story “Do Khidkiyaan” [Two Windows], in which there’s a wordplay about ‘words’ and their ‘meanings’ using the metaphor of windows and the paths they lead to.) A reader’s mind is as decisive as the medium in which when light enters, it bends or moves away—its refractive index.
Be it the usage of “aloneless” in a poem (“The Tenderness of Being Two”) or the description of a reckless youth (in “Montage on Love”)—“He was irresistible as only the very young of any species are programmed to be. He played enthusiasm like an extreme sport”—Swami seems to demonstrate her prowess as a writer to masterfully employ words. Her craft is like a prism, from which white light disperses into colourful bands. The reader can only marvel hopelessly at this phenomenon.
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Saurabh Sharma is a reader and a writer. He works as a writer in an IT research and advisory firm in Gurgaon. He reviews books and pretends to write on weekends. You can find him on Instagram: @writerly_life and Twitter: @writerly_life.
