MATCHBOX

Anju Makhija is a poet of staggering visuals, dazzling sensuality and haunting presence, with a complexity and originality not often seen in contemporary English poetry. And this has led me to detect in her poems uncanny ‘radical delicacy’ of ‘body politic and the body ecstatic’ at the double edge of a strange praxis of performative language. That’s why her poems don’t explode- they ‘splinter piece-by-piece’, in her own words? Is it a split-second mirage by a magician or  the cinematic dissolve by a playwright? Whatever you call it, I am blinded by the sight of ‘ Skeleton of Mohenjo-daro’, the most visceral and most beautiful poem of her collection.

 Having achieved the unusual distinction of being neither “confessional’ nor ‘rhetorical’ in the conventional sense of feminist poetry, she has etched herself, like ‘permanence of stone’, into the skin of Indian poetry like the surreal insurrection of a language of forests and flowers, and ensured her place alongside Eunice De Souza, Kamala Das, and of course her favorite poet Keki Daruwalla.  Given her search for alchemical experience of ‘self-extinction’, I also hear voices of Akka Mahadevi, Amrita Pritam, and Anne Sexton in her poems and her poetic craft.  Reminding us of Kamala Das’s sensuous extravagance and Eunice de Souza’s linguistic precision, Anju Makhija has crafted her own language like a computational theologist, a miniaturist artist who sketches vital – life forces that defies the inherited conditions of erasure. Excavating sublime and colloquial from the ravages of modernity, she makes our world aberrant and familiar as if she is an archeologist setting up installations of bronze memories in the La La land of Anglophone poetry in post-colonial India.

Like Amrita Pritam,  Anju Makhija uses “intimate afflictions” as the source of her engagement and estrangement  with the language. This  cathartic blending of familial and social lends fragility and child-like  innocence to her craft of ‘ split-second mirage, the cinematic dissolve’.   Like a bee on a personal rampage through nectar- Changing, Unchanging, is also about a physics of impermanence and transcendence. In physic, ‘black hole’ is a mystical place, an enigmatic region of space-time, where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light can escape, a self-illuminated vision that defines the universe. And that to me is at the core of   Anju Makhija’s work as a poet and a feminist mystic rooted into her Sindhi identity.  In a Bakhtinian sense, when  you enter into her poems, you are permanently sucked into the double experience of neither death nor immortality. In this space of neither existence nor non-existence, her poems are born with her “granny’s ashes” in her words.  No wonder, she invites her readers to be ‘  Like a tortoise… fix your mind on me, worship me and without doubt you shall reach me”.

In other words, Changing, Unchanging, an authoritative collection of twenty-eight years of Anju Makhija’s writing life, is an audacious feat of linguistic adventures and mesmerizing play of cosmological surprises, a fiercely original record of a wanderer’s journey with our existential destiny in  a nation coming to terms with its inner turbulences. There are no baroque structures, overstatement or repetitive parenthesis in her poetic craft. Most of her poems have cellular structure with molecular rhythm  and imagery. Consider this “ My arms around your body, limbs colder than ice, you tilt ever so slightly, we both die” from her poem Last Hours!

In short, every  poem in  Changing, Unchanging is an example of imagined street worlds of dispossession and disobedience of language  where new tonalities  are tested against the realities of  real life, simultaneously grounded and  ruptured. Unlike others from Bombay poetry, her aesthetic project of poetry is located in the primordial awareness of the physical body and biological  time blurring the conventional distinctions between bhava(feelings) and rasa(emotion). That’s why her aesthetic experience is   “Trance-like, immersed in the unknown, darkness their only reality” as she avers shyly in her poem Shadow.

Writing against the’ blurred and rubbery sentiments’ of post -colonial Anglophone poets,( most of them men), Anju weaves  layers of reality  (personal or political) into a revealing garment of deceptive beauty with a molten lava like feminist  consciousness.  If you don’t believe me then come to her ‘ Dargah’. In this miracle- like poem, there is so much material resonance of self-remembering of a violent past  that  “She prays: may my daughter never be in submission, may she never tie threads on the jaali.” In an array of poetic forms from the austere lyric to deeply meditative monologues to teasingly triangulating forms of dialogues like “ Meeting with Lord Yama”,  with a strange invocation of her audience in the act of utterance itself,  Anju’s poems  confront baffling chaos of modernity — an indeterminate future, and  the condition of  epistemic violence in our quotidian lives.  In this sense, unburdened by the post-modern technological gaze of the way “Apple tempts in new ways, Samsung dictates our lives, Google peers into eyes”, the arc of her poetry extends to the translational space of languages.

 Emotionally engaging, fluent with symphonic quality, her  poems are mirror -world of the existential surprises , and  they are  breathtakingly immediate, and redemptive as well.   Speaking in lawlessness of  polychromatic tongues,  she  stylistically  creates  an architectural grandeur, a flawless granite tower of syntaxes our ancestors have used for their ‘ dwelling’ in Heideggerian sense. If you are a poet and going to build a poem for yourself then consider this from her poem  Building a Farmhouse

A rustic room, teak windows

 framing wild flowers, dipped in dew;

 misty, as in the movies. A study

to hold volumes of Tagore and Yeats.

No wonder, after reading her poems in this collection, I felt  an unusual  awakening of myself through refracted memories of un-remembered past of our collective destiny. This strange carnival of a waiting for self-renewal  reveals the luminescent flux in which language disintegrates and reconstitutes itself into an entity that transcends what has preceded it . That’s why after Building a Farmhouse, Anju meditates on   Abandoning the Farmhouse  in such a beguiling simplicity that you are left  wondering about ‘ the house struggle’ — agitated, not knowing its fate — would Utopian ideals be lost?