Dr. Sukrita Paul Kumar
Introduction
Sukrita Paul Kumar was born and brought up in Kenya and at present she lives in Delhi, writing poetry, researching and teaching literature. An Honorary Fellow of International Writing Programme, University of Iowa (USA) and a former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, she was also an invited poet in residence at Hong Kong Baptist University. She has published five collections of poems in English including Rowing Together, Without Margins and Folds of Silence. She is the Guest Editor of Crossing Over, a special issue of “Manoa”, the Journal from the University of Hawaii, USA. Some of her publications also came out of the work done in Canada as a recipient of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Research Grant. She was also granted the Charles Wallace Grant more than a decade ago. In mid-2008, she, along with a colleague and with a research grant, prepared an e-lesson on “Managing Diversity in India and Canada”. Some of her poems are prescribed for study by different School Boards of Studies (including NCERT) and universities in India and abroad.
Sukrita’s major critical works include Narrating Partition, Conversations on Modernism, The New Story and Man, Woman and Androgyny. Some of her co-edited books are Ismat, Her Life, Her Times, Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature and Women’s Studies in India: Contours of Change. As Director of a UNESCO project on “The Culture of Peace”, she edited Mapping Memories, a volume of Urdu short stories from India and Pakistan. She has two books of translations, Stories of Joginder Paul and the novel Sleepwalkers. She is the chief editor of the book on Cultural Diversity in India published by Macmillan India and prescribed by the University of Delhi.
A recipient of many prestigious fellowships and residencies, Sukrita has lectured at many universities in India and abroad. A solo exhibition of her paintings was held at AIFACS, Delhi. A number of Sukrita’s poems have emerged from her experience of working with homeless people.
Two Poems: Traffic Signals and JAVA House
TRAFFIC SIGNALS
Do I see the flicker
of life in that corpse
…a shiver in the hand?
…a quiver
in the lip? The nose twitch?
Does the eye tremble
savouring the taste of
zafrani biryani in a dream?
Is that corpse real?
Laid out amidst incense and camphor
on the cold cement
of the divider
on that wide
wide road
the ghost of the man
dressed all in smoke,
from just above the body,
peers at me
from the vacant sockets
of the little boy
his arm extended,
the palm limp
and loud,
Hushed words slide down
his tongue
“Kafan, sahib,
money for the shroud, Babuji!”
My fingers roll the glass down
the foot pressing hard on the breaks
The car’s movement
punctuated
with
Death
crawling like
black ants on the boy
ants that
do not sting
but crawl as pinpricks
down one’s back
I drop my questions,
doubts crack up
I look death
Direct in its eyes
The boy with the limp palm
a genius in mimesis
Each night
The corpse rises for his biryani
each day
The boy is buried deeper
into his ant hill.
Two Poems
ARRIVAL
JAVA HOUSE, IOWA CITY
Café au lait
Unleashed from the contours
of a smile
I felt the American Indian
feel me
with his brown native eyes,
reaching out from just above
the edges of the table
pushed against the farthest wall,
on which hung his portrait
with his arms as if
resting on the table
In Java House
amidst the buzz of
alien coffee percolators
and strange twangy English,
he and I
waited for the first move
he with his crown of feathers
I with the perfect round
teeka on my forehead,
both Indians in exile
one on his own land
the other for whom
the rising of the sun
was at once its setting
as on her own land
seven seas away
In the corner stood our witness
The piano with its
stern, philosophic countenance
European in its temper
Pregnant with sopranos and crescendos
Our homeland
we agreed
was the horizon
where all the Indians go
after they die
Delicate rings of smoke
rose from coffee-cups
and the songs of silence drowned the piano;
Inside Java House
the earth met the sky
for us to reach
our homeland.
without dying.
Two Paintings:
untitled
Translation
previous
next