Book review | Arjavam: A collection of everyday poetry that feels like home

Arjavam: “The dictionary meaning of this Sanskrit word is straightforward, open-hearted, simple.”

Open-hearted and simple are the two words that come to mind after reading and re-reading Geetha Ravichandran’s debut book, Arjavam.

Sprinkled with personal elements and memories of Ravichandran, Arjavam touches one with a sense of belonging that would connect with almost every Indian reader. It almost feels written for every individual reader, a sense of coming home to familiar smells, people and memories of those people cannot be missed in Ravichandran’s poetry.

Talking to Firstpost, she confirms that there is definitely a personal element in many poems. However, “poetry should draw upon a larger impersonal context, beyond the confines of the personal, to be relevant”. And it does all that and more.

She writes in ‘The House that Let Us Go’:

“There were seven coconut trees, Planted at an auspicious hour Their grand fronds, grim and ghostly In the sticky, brooding night air.

“It was the jasmine that climbed up a trellis Blooming every evening, Its fragrance, lilting like a melody, That made the house special.”

The collection of poems written through different phases of her life is divided into four sections, titled after musical terms – ‘Layam’, ‘Swaram’, ‘Talam’, and ‘Raagam’.

The reason she says is, “Just the way a piece of music has several elements, which blend seamlessly into a whole, the book has subtitles relating to music, as life is a medley of experiences”.

The author begins the book of poetry by churning out prose of pain and bereavement in the first section, ‘Layam’. Her pain for a larger societal crisis unfolding around her isn’t missing from her poems as she talks of ‘Sunita’, ‘Poornima’, ‘Maya’, ‘Swathi’, a grandmother here and a wilting mother there.

Some of the poems are a retelling of personal experiences, “stretched and suited with bits of imagination”.

Buried in the themes of loss and death, a faint sliver of hope shines too at times.

Ravichandran writes in a poem titled ‘Father’s Funeral’:

“It wrenched the heart to say goodbye, But it seemed that morning, Mourning was banished on the beach. As waves lapped our feet And the wind blew our faces dry Right there besides us, Fluttering on fragile wings, Was a startling, golden butterfly.”

The second section delves into a sense of nostalgia dipped in childhood memories. The poems in the section are largely about a house, a holiday trip of which a glass reindeer and a fake Rado watch remains, and memories of incidents and places early and late in her life, including her days in Chennai or Madras, the city where she grew up.

“The beauty that we had barely acknowledged now appears in streaks of memories,” she writes in ‘The House that Let Us Go’.

If in ‘Swaram’ her poems look back at a childhood lived among trees, in ‘Talam’ it’s a youth among a jungle of concrete. Both, however, are home.

The gloom, glamour, restlessness, and the oft-talked mysterious ways of the city of Mumbai come alive in the third section. It appears as if the unassuming and unceasing rhythm of the commercial capital of India has lent its character to the chapter.

“The rhythm of the waves, the long note of the monsoon rains, the clatter of the locals resonate even after one moves out of the city,” says Ravichandran, an IRS officer of 1987 batch and currently the Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax, Mumbai.

The final section of the book, ‘Raagam’, is a little bit of everything – a slice of life collection, if one must put it into a category.

Ravichandran’s free-flowing everyday poetry at times feels like a gentle whisper of a lover on a rainy morning and at others it becomes a haunting echo of that whisper.

She writes in ‘Poornamidam’:

“Maybe, love is just a crackle That sends sparks flying Which singe as they settle.”

Her poetry is not riddled with words or complex structures that make most be apprehensive of the literary form, but is written in a fluid conversational rhythm that doesn’t necessarily follow rules or poetic traditions.

The author has credited her father and sister for the love of the written word that is evident from page one till the last where she recalls her sister, Jai, reading from the famous poem by Max Ehrmann, written in 1927.

“Go placidly, amidst the noise and the haste and remember what peace there may be in silence”.

The words written nearly a century ago resonate in Ravichandran’s poetry as she writes, “We are gentler when we breathe free.”

Published by Red River, Arjavam is available on online and offline stores for Rs 299.

“Proceeds from the sale of the book, including the author royalties, will be donated to ‘Small Differences’, a Coimbatore-based NGO working with very vulnerable populations, particularly the elderly homeless, women and the transgender community,” the publisher has declared.

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