Mother Muse Quintet, by Naveen Kishore is published by Speaking Tiger and is available here. For more buying options, check out Amazon and Seagull Books.
Approaching works of Naveen Kishore – for me – is an endeavor of immense reflection as are his conversations – always! It is a process… first read… first layer… word… space… sentence… lyric…pause. Second layer – mulling over and over…back and forth… not just reading… but listening between the lines… the stops and the pauses…the rhyme and the rhythm… and then pregnant silence! It triggers responses… visions… and evokes a rawness. You are swept off; mounted on the viewless wings of poesy, breath taken away… only to pour that evocation in black and white – or as he himself meditated in a tribute for KG Subramanyan:
“To me the act of writing is like playing Russian roulette with the veins in one’s wrist. Blindfolded. Slash the wrist. Let it bleed. If you are lucky you will write the “meaningful.” The edgy. As close to a truth as you can get.”
These lines too were eye opening… ideas – perhaps might have been there… buried… perhaps deep within… in a mind, slumbering… but as soon as I read them… they. simply. Resonated!!
And thus, pondering over Kishore’s world becomes a journey….
Indeed, Mother Muse Quintet is an ode to remembrance… a melancholic rendition about the loss that is forgetting… a bereavement invoked when one is bereft of one’s parent who is slowly fading away… In this case, Kishore’s mother.
Truly, Mother Muse Quintet is that, yet so much more. Like all his works, his creations suggests… conjures connotations, deductions that may be collective and yet so deeply personal – unique and even idiosyncratic.
With breadcrumbs do our travels begin… navigating through a ‘mist’, picking up the scattered crumbs… ‘clues’ ‘like markers in a treasure hunt’… the reader attempts at unraveling the haze that encumbers remembrance. Life and measured time, one deliberates, feel like birds of prey, devouring the very crumbs… that help her find her way home… Reflecting over these lines, one cannot help but think… the rapaciousness of measured time… as it leaves one and all with a rising fog… a parallel tango of knowing and its lack. The loss that is forgetting… yearning to hold on to remembrance that are just fading fragments of memories.
Soaked, yes – not drenched – in grief, Kishore steps into a room somewhere… Old, Haunted… Haunted by memories… Why? For they are raw, unfiltered, unadulterated, untouched by the ostentation of language, time? But then again, those memories, reflects the poet, You (Kishore’s mother – Prem-ji – the loved one ) gifted me my memory. We did not know then that one day you would lose yours.
But She never lost hers… did she? Prem gifted her son those memories… for Love alters not with his brief hours…
And yet the doting son cajoles, pleads clock to turn time…. Making attempts to distract measured time with his pain… grief… for a few more pebbles polished with memories.
Kishore speaks of her looking at him like you would into a mirror… stepping all over her scattered self… disheveled she looked at him. But she never looked at the mirror, he once gifted her. She, perhaps, looked at him as her mirror?
Life, time, space… are all but splitting of seconds into more seconds… smashing crumbling into atoms… causing grief.When one suddenly realizes… as Prem-ji says… Out of the blue… The play is the thing… And perhaps the actors in the room somewhere… are haunted… by the rattling… of a half shut window… a doorway to memories past – unfiltered, raw.
Mother, Kishore’s Muse… his home, our home… stand in the haze of oblivion – a loss? Nay… not so… not so! For grief – it may seem eternal, it is but worldly, specks of dust spread across the universe we call love!
Nothing remains?… But shadows… shadows that form as one walks into the sunlight… as he, as we make attempts to not look back… at memories… moments past… failing to succumb even once to the temptation of looking back… for only the fog that is life, space and time measured… remains in pursuit of us… knotting us with grief… As one walks into the sunlight… the shadow… the sun… the warmth… the prem is already there… enveloping Kishore… enveloping us!
Mother Muse Quintet for a novice like myself translates into a hopefulness – the triumph of the spirit… love…prem…over matter… over fragments that we dotingly call life… over loss that is forgetfulness… over loss that is erasure!
