The Indian English After the English The questions, The English or English? English Medicine or Allopathy? Allopathy or Homeopathy? Homeopathy or Anandaiah medicine? always flicker here like the restless flame on Mahatma Gandhi's Tomb with the teasing definite article or hidden mischief of the alluring coordinating conjunction. My Experiments with truth of a handful of hidden nuances sandwiched in the crevices of this colonial tomb in the corridors of our patriotic psyche, crawl in and out with their spindly legs, alluring our the proficient hands that hold the letters of the nation. The English' alphabet's the integral subject of our academe's perennial present continuous tense, with we being it's green-bunched predicates the verbal action of which incessantly flows in our flamboyant veins, with our ever-fresh status of being direct objects with clenched fists of our syntactical fury against the perennial noontides. The tireless struggles to shake off it's hold ends in those grace marks our own teachers give in the final exam results. The perfectly grammatical active voice with those intransitive verbs of our passive voice still whine at the scattered, and greying colonial foundation stones that grin in ubiquitous plentifuls at our chronic addiction to vocal and aural tips of our higher education's anglicised body. My son proudly salutes to our royal flag in the school Independence day costume looking at the brimming Aphrodite chocolate basket, it's holder being the Sanskrit teacher, who calls him aside after the momentous flag hoisting and tells off, Yatho Hasta thatho Drishti, Yatho Drishti thatho Manah Yatho Manah thatho Bhaava, Yatho Bhaava thatho Rasa But again the embarrassed English grammar blinks on the school's peeling Black board that whitens only in strokes of momentary chalk scripts in his Grammar class. In the visions of those winkless motifs of my subconsciously preoccupied notions, a mason always leisurely spreads the-vengeful faced lichen-tinted bricks from this Good Earth for the intensified, tense future tense of a de-Anglicised grammar on the flickering pages of my academe. On the shifting sands of the Suryalanka Beach the last flock of gray-winged Gulls explode a take-off heading west, leaving behind those rhythmic cackles of crystalline intonation of a non-ethereal language.
A Compromised Contentment When I often clench at my father's fist that clenched at me with his fistful of my calendars he perforated those luminous dates in with hard and fast nailed hands taking over the clock of my home he timed and alarmed time and again, the hope in the twitters in the Sunrise of my children's sincere drawings, on the crystalline pages of their sky always reminds that my day's yet towards an evening where they will watch theirs boast of the proud moments I'll have saved for them, in the air
The Sound of Third Wave a letter from Machilipatnam Every bulletin roars like a gun point obligation on the temple of the nation's fourth estate, as if a noontide of an unscreened affidavit, is in store for us, even as the country just unmasks it's locked down face washed afresh by the first monsoon drafts. unlike the sweet silence of those pre-Covid nights, in the blissful ignorance of any sudden morning of cold fever, today our nights pace in our beds with the discordant creaks of a haunting uncertainty of next minute and a more uncertain nightmarish morning, we panic with our children on our weak hearts, while the incessant sounds of those monstrous hydraulics play second fiddle to orchestrate some Neroic dreams of national vistas. In the duel between the fear-muffled sound of the public fury and that of a Theia Mania's failed dream, the non-violent history of democracy dons a sooty apocalyptic cassock of an unholy ghost with the barbaric strategy of its infantry towards our infants in the mythic proportions.
Fear of Handcuffs in Pandemic Bhayiom Aur Behanom! in this Good Earth today the police handcuffs search for the rickshaw pullers' and coolies', hands which, tired of finding work, pasted the anti-government posters, resorting to avenge the opposition's voice to protest the scarcity of children’s vaccine sold off in the welfare of national vistas, seen in the jaw-dropping sculptures, naked, crowds of Kumbh Mela or the magnificent domes of Ayodhya. Elsewhere a special team searches for a photo journalist that captured the pictures of the government ambulances a minister used to transport cement for a new parliamentary Bhavan, while the TV channels don’t cover their absence in government hospitals fearing handcuffs. Note: 1. Bhayiom Aur Behanom is typical of Prime Minister Narander Modi’s public address Kumbh Mela: an annual Hindu pilgrimage festival that happens on the famous Indian river banks
Let's be Pepys (remembering Samuel Pepys during Covid) because, though engulfed by the plagued clock, he met his mistress with life, burning as breath of hope. Since love is waxed at this periphery between time and eternity, let these home remedies of love from our long quarantined hearts be out in our physical quarantines, shut up and relive the first love paying back our long pending dues of home for God's sake opening up those fermented silences and burn into flames, to flee this contagion, as smoke upward. Note: Diary of 17th-century British naval administrator named Samuel Pepys shows how life under the plague mirrored today’s pandemic.
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Photography Credit: Jason Rice (detail)
Sreekanth Kopuri is an Indian poet, current poetry editor of Kitchen Sink Magazine, Alumni Writer in Residence, Athens and a Professor of English from Machilipatnam, India. He recited his poetry in University of Oxford, John Hopkins University, Heinrich Heine University and many others. His poems appeared in Christian Century, Chicago Memory House, A Honest Ulsterman, Heartland Review, Lannang Archieves, Tulsa Review, A New Ulster, The Rational Creature, Nebraska Writers Guild, Poetry Centre San Jose, Underground Writers Association, Athereon Review, Word Fountain, Synaeresis, Wend Poetry, Vayavya, Ann Arbor Review to mention a few. His book Poems of the Void was finalist for the Eyelands Books Award Greece, 2019. He is the recipient of the Immanuel Kant Award for his collection of poems on Silence 2020. He lives in his hometown, Machilipatnam, with his mother.
