Amit Shankar Saha
While planning this issue of EKL Review, where Anindita Bose has curated a section on “parents”, it was perhaps destined that I will find this poem titled “Dreaming of Ma by the Sea” in Malashri Lal’s book Mandalas of Time.
You live somewhere between the black night
And the bright star;
Free of body and its temporal limits. (p. 42)
Thus writes Malashri Lal as she discovers her mother’s saree pallav in the green leaves turning to red, her mother’s smile in the shimmer of an unsteady wave, and ultimately meets her “When the dark sky rests on the sparkle of stars.” The mandala, in its circular pattern, symbolizes unity and harmony, where creation is never ending and everything is connected – “Living and dying are no longer apart.”
When Ranjit Hoskote refers to the dwandva in Malashri Lal’s poems by evoking the dyadic interplay of opposites in Nature and humankind, Shiva and Shakti, Radha and Krishna, and also in Tagore’s renaming of Acacia as Sonajhuri, and in general, the communion of the sacred and the worldly, he highlights the fact that there are no binary poles but mandalas of continuum. Take for example this review, or for that matter any review, it is an inseparable composite with the book whose review it is. For a reader this review is incomplete unless he or she also reads the book Mandalas of Time.
If Malashri Lal’s book indicates a continuum, Sanjukta Dasgupta’s Ekalavya Speaks hints at a schism – the schism of the severed thumb – between Dronacharya and Ekalavya, the haves and the have-nots, the privileged and the underprivileged, the favoured and the discriminated, the right and the wrong. Malashri Lal has written in her poem “Easter Lilies in an Empty Home”:
The supple leaves
Flat and curved
Cradle the flowers that have no other family. (p. 108)
Dronacharya could never be those supple leaves. In the Preface, Dasgupta mentions Orhan Pamuk who had pointed out the basic human fear “of being left outside”. In the poem “Chuni Kotal’s Query”, Dasgupta writes:
Dear Saviour of the have-nots
Shall we always remain
The outsider ‘Others’ (p. 45)
If the subaltern is unheard and the answer given by the supple leaves is unseen, then the schism will remain. Literature is a gentle tap on the shoulder of our conscience. In the poem “Come October” Dasgupta mentions opalescent October when “Festival and funerals/ Jostle and juxtapose”:
Here
Life and love yet
Persists despite cysts
Tumours and scars
As ruins explode…
With October flowers (p. 164)
The world is filled with contrasts and paradoxes. When Sanjukta Dasgupta writes about the maternal clasp that steadies, secures and soothes, she actually hints at the healing powers of motherliness that can heal the schisms of the world. The mandala can be complete only by integration and not by substitution.