by Aju Mukhopadhyay
Born in Bikaner and now living in Mumbai, Vinita Agrawal studied in Darjeeling, Kolkata and Baroda. Drawn spiritually towards Buddhism, maybe by pre-birth affiliation, she is a Buddhist by inclination and choice. She is particularly keen on understanding women’s role and position in Buddhism. Vinita has written essays and presented papers in many learned assemblies but she is a poet by nature with her heart blooming first before the intellect. Because of her mental setup and inclination towards a particular world view, her poems reflect her mind, heart and faith meticulously but they are not simple rhyming of her thoughts, nor straying on different subjects as they appear before her eyes; her subjects are always selected. Words Not Spoken is the first book of poems by Vinita, containing 82 poems covering a period of 16 or more years.
“Sometimes
their wayward pain rises like stream
and scars our lips
as we sip the brews delicately
from gold rimmed bone china cups”
Oolong, Orange Pekoe or Darjeeling/14
This is the first poem of the book. Its background is the painful life of tea-leaf pluckers who live an abominable life of poverty whereas the leaves that they pluck are of rare delicacies of the world.
Pain is the poet’s constant companion, “The night passes like a slow thread / through the eyes /leaving behind a soot of pain.” (Soot of Pain/115)
Why?
Because in her life “the gallnuts of karma protrude from every angle /like branches on a forest path / and irritates like gadflies. . . . and I am born again /after the night has passed.” (The Logo of Being /16)
To the poet, pain is stubborn, it never loses its ground. “In existence there is pain,” she says, “The pain seeks shelter in our bodies . . . . / when life is done /and death has taken us /the pain remains /stubborn, sullen, amazing pain /insinuated to another’s body perhaps.” (Pain /48)
She cannot escape this karma and its effect which gives her company even after she is reborn. The karmic effect is according to Buddhist canon but it is originally Hindu religious faith and philosophy; the idea of karma and rebirth. For after all, Buddha only revolted against the falling trends of Hinduism, whatever it was at his time, but he was not out of it. Hindus consider Sakya Muni, his other name, as an avatar.
The pain arising from a mother’s death is poignantly shared in “Mortakka”. It is tremendously emotional, tugging the heart strings.
“Daddy carried you in an earthen pot
all five kg of ashes . . . .
Slowly the urn
raised shoulder high
released you
I watched my happy times swirl out of existence”
Mortakka /45
With a melancholic disposition, the poet paints time with a dismal brush which is the reflection of her anguished heart. “time at its worst /is the empty room and doorway of a house /in which an old man lives silently /waiting only for death.” (Time /31)
Her love seems never to have been fulfilled, full of desires as they are. Decay and death intermingle in her poetry giving rise to unease and uncertainty.
“The roads are drained of destination
they mingle, they separate but lead nowhere.”
Drained /111
Vinita Agrawal is a Nature lover too; a conservationist. She is deeply pained by the trauma that animals face as well.
“This May
my country’s tigers did not smile –
staring extinction in the eye . . . .
This April
the count of eggs
from sandhill cranes was scary . . . .
Civilization had ravaged their marshy
wetlands and razed it to dry fields”
Screams Etched in Stone /91-92
In another Nature poem, “Anklets of a Lost Habitat” (28), the irony is evident – Nature creating havoc but recreating art works in the field of death, alluring delighted village girls to decorate their bodies with such dead shells.
The partition of the country in 1947 inflicted a deep scar in her life as in many lives. She gives a graphic description and captures the trauma of that communal partition accepted by the then leaders of the country as it suited their purpose.
“I was ten then and stayed ten all my life,
frozen against a berm of terror and trauma.”
Season of Partition /41
The same memory of partition recurs in her “Just for Tonight” (57). Being a Buddhist by heart, she has full sympathy for the Tibetans uprooted from their native land. She finds her own image in them.
“The enemy has ravaged modest dwellings at gunpoint
. . . .
hungry, empty
the refugees are here
only to keep alive the stories of their land”
The Refugees Are Here /32-33
“When I Look at You” (102) is a song of Tibet, a country desolate.
In one of the poems, she rues the fate of someone being born a girl. The woman poet in her laments,
“They say I run deep /like a well. . . . Do they know that /mere straws of poise /hold this well together?. . . . some sins are unforgivable, /like being born a girl.”(A Well /110)
Her lament continues in another poem where she feels that she is already past sixty which is a streak of her romantic imagination for she isn’t sixty yet.
“No matter what or where
a woman is
She is loved
only as long as she is needed”
Stone Bubbles /59
Some poems speak of love that has faded away or has been snapped, causing inevitable pain gnawing the heart like,
“Let us prepare for the distance.”
Draconian /70
Or
“Have I told you about the sound I always heard
whenever we were together?
A whine . . .
it came from me
My insides knew you would leave me,
they knew.”
Hangman /84
Some romantic lyrics indicate that its happening would be a delicate peacock dance but in reality, love is wistful thinking leaving the poet in a painful daze.
“When longings suck me like torrential rains,
then I shall come to you”
Some Day /22
The ideas and teachings of Buddha have permeated her being. She adores him, reveres him most. So she writes,
“Buddha- the enlightened one . . . lives in all of us
fold yourself inwards – as fine and as deep as you can go
to reach the light-maker in you.”
The Light Maker /76
Buddha realized the core issue of human existence that desires of all kinds keep us ever in a state of dukkha or sorrow which according to the Hindus is produced by the ripus, the six inherent cardinal passions that bind a man to the earth necessitating rebirth. Buddha advised man to come out of the cycle of desires to finally attain nibbana or Nirvana. Vinita, the follower of Buddha, bought a puppet from the bazaar of Jaipur which looked beautiful. In it we find a suppressed irony of life,
“it saw but never spoke
never cried
always smiled, looked bridal . . .
it never gained weight
never wanted sex . . .
and had the detachment
that the Buddha would have envied . . . .
it was everything that I could never be”
Puppet /49
It is the dichotomy of life, of flesh and blood; adoring something or someone, wishing to be but actually failing to catch one’s dream in reality.
“I clasped my dreams too close to heart
and never set them free . . .
when time escaped with my dreams
I lost one person – me . . . .
It left an empty me”
Iniquity /121
Finally what is left is emptiness, Shunyata. Though Vinita’s poems seem to be pessimistic, actually they aren’t so materially. For, they are not the result of any frustration but are based on faith expressed in very artistic and poetic ways. In such a poetic journey like the one she has made, what is left is a bare truth: Shunyata.
Imagery, alliterations and metaphors abound in her poetry, mostly subjective that tell many tales of her life. Although a stream of pain flows through her poems, they are very satisfying when read as pieces of art. The famous words of Shelley come to mind: our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts. Vinita’s poetry fills the reader with Karunyam (compassion), one of the navarasas (nine emotions), a part of the ancient aesthetic theory of Bharat Muni A thread of pain or pathos resulting in compassion runs through her weaved words which becomes sweet poetry.
Work Cited
Words Not Spoken. Vinita Agrawal. Howrah; Brown Critique-Sampark. 2013
Aju Mukhopadhyay, Pondicherry, India, is an award winning bilingual poet and author. His poems and stories have been widely anthologised and translated. His essays have been published in more than 50 books. He is in the editorial boards of many important magazines. Eight books contain discussions on his poetry. His Japanese style of verses abounds in international ezines and some magazines with two books of such poems published. He has three books of short stories published in Bangla and two in English. One of his short stories has been published in a Collection of Indian Short Stories in German language. He has recently been awarded Albert Camus Centenary Writer’s award. His recently published book is Manhood, Grasshood and Birdhood (10th book of poems) and The Story of India’s Progress (mostly on the present position of India) is expected to hit bookstores soon.
