We lay together on a charpoy, the thrum on asbestos roofs ending all days. The downpour cantillates like Sanskrit chanting we had heard at Kamakhya temple, the one in the drenched valley of leechee and guava trees. As we gathered by Dikhow’s shore, the river gravid with mud, branches and massive trunks flowed with a ferocity towards a cantilever bridge. Brahmaputra becomes a sea every monsoon, never settling, inundating all the elephant grass which our mahout carefully holds back on our rides. Today we wander into another summer on Lakshman Jhula where the Ganges turns green, tourists run to small motels to escape the drizzle. Some things do not change—the small delight of sitting on a railway platform savoring chana dal fritters by wet train tracks with steaming cardamom tea in clay cups. There is a storm expected, already the smell of rain mouses its way in like the time you cried after your mother’s passing, the sky was splayed by Indra’s bow. There was so much dampness the night your water broke, as we ran from the laundromat with a newspaper over our heads, the car’s floor mats also soaked from a leaking heater core. And this is how I know you, on an outrigger listening to a whale song in a drizzle, breeze coursing on your face, not joyless but not joyous for anything and in its swells
Srinivas Mandavilli: “My first experience of writing poetry in English was during high school years in India and for that I will forever be indebted to Sr. Helen Mary, an English teacher in a small dusty town in Western India. Several years later, in the U.S., I found myself returning to writing and many poems seem to stem from memories of childhood spent with family, or around food and travel. Such memories seem to emerge from revisiting India as an adult and a tourist, but also from the distance created by living in the U.S.”
Pankaj Khemka: “I was originally born in Nagpur. After my family emigrated to the United States, I became a physician, specializing in infectious diseases. My cultural influences, both Eastern and Western, color my poetry in the way I see first-world problems from a more holistic perspective.”
Zilka Joseph: “My home was Kolkata, India. I grew up there, was educated there, taught there, and got married there. Years later, I moved to the U.S. with my husband, and struggled with all the things that new immigrants (of color, especially) go through. I would return home to see my parents, to help them as they got older and frailer. But I have not visited that city since my mother passed. Entire worlds seem lost to me, and yet they are all present in some dimension as they are inextricably entangled with the present. Sometimes it seems that I have lived several lives all at once and memories of these many lives (in India and in the U.S.) overlay and play with each other. Parents, friends, relatives, students have come and gone, and I grapple with the emptiness that is left behind. I especially mourn the loss of my beloved parents, my city, and in some of my poetry, I try to bring what’s lost back to life.” (web)
Jinendra Jain: “I am studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Lasalle College of the Arts Singapore, a degree conferred by Goldsmiths, University of London. A retired banker, I have worked in various trading and risk management roles for twenty-five years, after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. I grew up in India, listening to the ghazals that inspire my nascent poetry practice, in theme as well as form. This poem draws inspiration from the opening stanza of Sudarshan Fakir’s popular nazm: ye daulat bhi le lo ye shohrat bhi le lo.” (web)
Kinshuk Gupta: “What I understand about people or poetry hugely relies on my experiences as an Indian. India, with its culture and contradictions, often becomes a part of my writing in ways difficult to comprehend. A poet’s journey, I feel, is the constant effort to push away the boundaries of personal to incorporate the global.”
Amlanjyoti Goswami: “India pervades my experiences and poetry. This is about living, breathing, and thinking deeply about things around me. Where I come from and where I am going. Traditions, histories, ways of seeing, hearing, and knowing. I draw upon rich traditions of Indian aesthetic in my work and am not afraid to cross borders. This is about the neem tree as much as the new Mercedes on the street, busy with street vendors selling you dim sums. There is an aesthetic in all this I wouldn’t find in New York or London. Layers more than strict lines. A lot of colour.”