Tag Archives: Kala Krishnan Ramesh

Book Review: He Is Honey, Salt And The Most Perfect Grammar by Kala Krishnan Ramesh

In these troubled times, those of us with god-love in our veins but sense in our brains modulate devotion with analyses and apologies. How does one evade playing into a larger project that has nothing to do with the personal? How does one have faith when faith itself is weaponised? Bangalore-based Kala Krishnan Ramesh’s debut collection of poetry, He Is Honey, Salt And The Most Perfect Grammar, staunchly refuses these quandaries altogether. The poet-protagonist of this book is situated in a time where kings govern and manuscripts are written with styluses on palm leaves, bound together by a peacock-blue thread obtained from hyacinth dye. She is mad enough that her neighbours watch her as she stands on cliff edges, gesturing at the sun in what appears to be a one-sided conversation. She is sound enough that classrooms are entrusted to her, and still she comes close to blurting out to her students the verses whispered in her ears, but finds herself “struck/ dumb as you / squat in my mouth / your feet / pressing / my tongue / down so you / can reach into / my heart.” This is how he comes to her, her god: as language.

Murugan, the god of Pazhani hill, near which the poet-protagonist lives and longs in plain sight of a half-bemused, half-understanding populace, is the subject and – as Ramesh iterates throughout the text – the progenitor of these verses. Among his many epithets, Guha – literally ‘cave’, abstracted poetically here as “heart-cave” – is the one she most often calls him by.

“This is He: He who longs for the sound of alphabets set to work praising him, his many hills, his two women, his love of battle, his dark-robed aloneing. This is He who crafts out signs for the tracker, doles out fervor for the oracles; the one who scatters questions, riddles and road blocks on the paths to Him. This is Guha, the One Who Hides in the Heart’s Cave.”

This is a book of metapoetry. From the first poem that invokes Ganesha as is tradition but casts him firmly in the role of publisher, the numerous allusions to Murugan as alphabet, syllable and potentate of the same (“god of words, word-tricks, word / debts”), and even a chastised (or is it chastisting?) piece on how a poet must not also be a critic – this is where poet and poet-protagonist blend knowingly. The self-consciousness is interesting, for emotively speaking the poems gush with pleasure and unabashed expression, seeking no audience but the deity.

With unadorned clarity, the author pledges permanent allegiance to the god: “Your name / companions my / journeys / your name / guards my life / your name / walks beside my words. / I write because you like / to inhabit the cities on my / page; / I sing because you like to / hear yourself being / praised in my voice. / I walk and stop and move / because you desire to / have me seek you.” She is often vexed, but rarely pained. A simple confidence runs through all her disputes and delights.

The poet-protagonist implores her lord for only one thing: a wellspring of words to please “Guha, who loves / a good poem more than / anything else in all the worlds”. She doesn’t seek protection or riches, she doesn’t supplicate for forgiveness for worldly deeds (only for the accusation that she has forgotten Him). Occasionally, we hear voices around her: the stylus maker from Madurai who speaks to her father, her mother who addresses their neighbours’ curiosity, Murugan’s wives Valli and Deivanai observing her in a fever delirium in which the deity comes to her and writes out poems she has promised for the following day’s assembly of scholars.

All of them indulge her, and this collection itself is one of deeply indulgent poems, but equally well-crafted. Some devotional writing lends itself to expansive interpretation; here, the subjectivity creates a capsule of experience. But the reader sometimes feels like an outsider, one of the many people who watch the poet-protagonist in her intoxication.

The book closes on a dream in which Murugan visits the poet on the night before she turns fifty – and so we know that she has crossed all manner of youthful exhilarations and societal imperatives happily, with the assurance of her lord: “Know this, my dear poet, when I / write you / I do not love you like a parent or / a patron, but like a poet loves his words, / and I do not carry you protected, safe / in pockets of my love, but send / you out into the world, / for I / write you fit to fight…”

This book is an anachronism in a gentle sense, stepping out of time and into an ageless emotional matrix. He Is Honey, Salt And The Most Perfect Grammar is playful, perfectly devoid of cynicism, a welcome wandering away from the gravely mundane.

An edited version appeared in The Hindu BLink.

The Venus Flytrap: The Colour Of Craving

The first mango of the season isn’t what it used to be, a rite, sometimes devoured knifeless over the kitchen sink, pulp dripping to the elbows. No – that gives me away as one who eats alone, which I often am, but I know that a shared bowl of slices is how it usually goes. I am avoiding that sweetness this year, instinctively. I don’t need more heat. I don’t need more thirst. But I want that brilliant colour, the colour of the ambrosial flesh that bursts through as nails or blade break green skin. I call that colour, simply, “mango” – but for centuries it was recreated as a pigment known as “Indian yellow”, made from the urine of cattle that lived on nothing but mango leaves.

That too, a colour. Rain-dripped, in my imagination. The voice of a woman without a lover sears across millennia from the Kuruntokai, in a poem about the ardour of the body without an admirer. These specific words: “my beauty dark as a mango leaf.” She grieves its inevitable pallor from inattention; she grieves, in short, a lack of colour.

People went to great lengths to create pigments. They used the wrappings on mummies for a shade of brown, and went deep into Afghani mines for an ultramarine hue made from powdered lapis lazuli. I want to say the great artists of those times knew what riches and gore they held at the tips of their paintbrushes, but the truth is I doubt it. We do not think deeply about our consumption either: the dead trees of our libraries and furniture, the farmers’ tears in our food.

Today’s artists may not have pyramids and mines excavated for pigments, but they still feud over them. Anish Kapoor secured exclusive rights over the laboratory-produced Vantablack, the blackest known substance on earth, which absorbs up to 99.965% of light. Stuart Semple then one-upped him with The World’s Pinkest Pink, made available for sale to all, with the exception of Kapoor and his associates.

There are more imaginative names for colours, so striking in themselves that they change the way a fabric drapes or the way the eye drinks in an object. Verdigris. Oxblood. Bastard-amber. Rose madder. Coquelicot. Areca. And there are medical conditions – synaesthesia – which affect the way in which the senses perceive. So one may see music, words and numbers as distinct colours. To some, this cognition is a gift. I wonder if it’s a disorder too, the pleasure I get from language, how singular words are charged for me with emotive dimensions. Sometimes my mouth waters because of a word.

And my heart is somehow soothed by the sight of indigo, made with that dye that cannot dissolve in water but bleeds and bleeds once on fabric, like someone with a lot of fortitude, who cries often. A plant dye that evokes another one, and more poems still: the protagonist of Kala Krishnan Ramesh’s He Is Honey, Salt And The Most Perfect Grammar binds her manuscripts with thread dyed with hyacinths, a signature.

And let me just say: Kapoor is wrong, anyway. The darkest material in the world isn’t a colour.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on April 13th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.