Click here for more info about Mother Muse Quintet, published by Speaking Tiger.
Sabin Hello and welcome everyone. I am absolutely thrilled to welcome Naveen Kishore at the fourth edition of the Women in Literature Festival. Welcome, Naveen.
Naveen. Thank you, Sabin, for having me here.
Sabin. A little bit about Naveen . . . Naveen Kishore is a poet, a theatre practitioner, photographer and publisher at Seagull Books. Seagull publishes world literature in English translation, serious non-fiction, culture studies, performance studies, art and cinema.
Naveen’s two books of poetry, Knotted Grief and Mother Muse Quintet have been published by Speaking Tiger. The latter, Mother Muse Quintet—let me share this beautiful book, I’ve got notes in it as well—is the focus of our session today. The title is is ‘Ode to Remembrance’.
The session will unpack Naveen’s meditations that open doorways and walks the reader down memory lane, bound with remembrance, reminiscences, loss. During our session, Naveen will also share reflections on language as a tool for the colonizer, the dictator, the sovereign, the all-powerful leader who uses force and violence to dehumanize and erase our claim to humanity. So welcome, Naveen.
Naveen. Thank you.
Sabin. Naveen, you know, reading Mother Muse Quintet and Knotted Grief, it’s been such an immense journey for me. And it’s a daunting journey . . . because you not only read once, twice, you go back and forth, back and forth. There are so many layers to it, you know.
Coming to Mother Muse, the first time I read it, I read it as a reader, a layperson, then as a mother and caregiver, and also as a daughter. But now, six or eight months down the line, with so much happening. You know, it has been happening before as well . . . But what is happening in Gaza, Palestine, and not just Gaza, Sudan as well, and so many other countries . . . our countries as well. It’s been,. . . I’ve been looking at it (Mother Muse Quintet) with a different perspective—mother as home, mother as land. So let’s begin with that.
Let’s begin with homeland. where you were born. And start with that, and then we’ll trickle it down.
Naveen. Okay. I must confess, though, that while writing this book, the ‘mother’ as land was not a preoccupation to begin with. It was more what you said in the beginning about . . . it started off as a remembrance thing, not so much for myself, though that’s a given, since I am the vessel, as it were, in which these memories supposedly had stored themselves, rather than me storing them consciously. And the whole impulse was to actually share with an elder sibling, my sister, whom life kept away.
Initially in school, in boarding, she was the older one . . . My father kept shifting jobs. And I was the younger one who could easily change schools, and so on and so forth. And then she went to college, and then she was married, and then she was out of the country. So her memories were not necessarily lived-in the way mine resided within the mother–father, growing up, so to speak. So that was one part of it. And intuitive home in this particular book, strangely enough, is Kashmir, like it is in Knotted Grief.
The memory formation for me actually started with stories that I inherited and remembered and heard as a much-younger person than a sister who was five and a half, six years older. So it started as an exercise in, I think, dealing with a mutual grief, but more as a . . . in my case, gifting her things that she may not have remembered about her parents, her mother . . . a different and true telling of these mother’s tales, mother stories, giving her a sense of, her birthplace, as it were. The irony, of course, is that her birthplace was Lahore. She was a midnight’s child. She was a curfew kid, 1947, 28 June, city in flames, all that sort of stuff. And so, I think the idea at that point when you’re in the doing—and this is also true, as in our previous conversations about my work and life—which is that I do focus on jumping into the fray and doing things.
So I jumped into it and started to share letters, in terms of writing to her, with no expectation of responses. They would come—she writes very well, too—but they were occasional, but mine were relentless for two years. And somewhere, of course, one figured that there was a self-cathartic . . . or a kind of dealing with one’s own relationship with one’s parent, mother, and also dealing with the grief.
I’m not necessarily a consciously grieving person, in the sense that I don’t necessarily articulate it in conversations, because I get too busy with the logistics of life to deal with—in the nicest possible way, not like a burden. And there’s so much that one does . . . I learned very early that whatever private grieving there is, you tend to embrace it. And this advice I give to a lot of people around me or close to me that if you’re feeling really down about something, you need to not resist it, or hide from it, it has to be genuinely embraced.
It is happening to you at that moment, and till it becomes and merges almost physically as part of you. You won’t be comfortable . . . but these things don’t end, they don’t go away, after twelve years you still walk past her bedroom and, the light is off. So you don’t even have to look in to put the light off, it’s just . . . you just open the door and you can still see the many falls she may have had, or the injuries, and so on and so forth. So what I’m trying to say is it doesn’t really go away.
When you talk about . . . in poetic terms, yes, it does become an ode to remembrance—as you put it so nicely. But it also serves the purpose of a sharing, it also becomes a gift to a sister or a brother or whatever. And, after a while, you discover that in the act of remembering, the storytelling is not a factual one any longer. It is, of course. You do tell stories, but you also remember moods, you remember nuances, you remember clothes and food and touch and feel and the air and the atmosphere.
And, therefore, for some reason, Kashmir and Calcutta both play an important role, though I spent very little time in Kashmir. I may have later on connected in my work-life with a much more conflict-ridden part of our country, but the sheer weight of numbers is more in favour of my city, Calcutta. At the same time, I suppose, people like us tend to not . . . there’s no sense of longing for a home that you miss.
In the same way, when you’re remembering a mother, a father, sister, lover, whatever . . . longing becomes something that you’ve already embraced, and it’s a given, it’s a part of you. The sense that is left behind is, in fact, what fine hones your sensibility, it starts to show up in the way you work and think, and so on and so forth.
In the same way, when you’re remembering a mother, a father, sister, lover, whatever . . . longing becomes something that you’ve already embraced, and it’s a given, it’s a part of you. The sense that is left behind is, in fact, what fine hones your sensibility, it starts to show up in the way you work and think, and so on and so forth. So to try and attempt at a book of poems, which was not the initial intent or the impulse or the idea, it was an afterthought, as is most of my life—which is a retrospective. It’s almost like an afterthought because in the doing you’re just carrying on and so on and so forth. And to me, language became important because—and we can talk about that later. I talk about it in the book a little bit about somebody who gave me language, and was then to lose hers, because she slipped into a fog, as it were, gradually. And then, almost theatrical presence of a struggle of how one communicates with somebody who’s losing their language—they have taught you yours, but you no longer have the words to reach them, so there was a lot of that.
You’re seeking permission to amputate somebody’s limb, but you feel that . . . it’s hollow, because you don’t know if you’re getting through, right? So it’s a kind of a complicated thing. And if you were to take this away and just suddenly get all political on it—of course, you can read many things politically. The times that one talks about through this whole Mother Muse thing are rife with a certain politics, too.
So, therefore, your interesting idea of ‘home as mother’ and or mother as a kind of geographical location, that we all tend to fight over in a certain kind of way. It doesn’t quite, I mean . . . It would be dishonest of me to try and suggest that I had that in mind as a kind of . . . in the forefront. You know, it may somewhere have played a role, but it’s not consciously that.
I don’t know. I’m just rambling on.
Sabin. No, no, you’re not. Absolutely not. And I will be rambling on. Two things. You said something so beautiful about losing language. And it brought me . . . It’s a totally different interpretation . . . But I’m coming to [Ngũgĩ wa]Thiong’o’s ‘re-membering’, ‘re-membering’ of language. And here, I’m not talking in terms of politics or society. But when you’re saying, you know, losing language, how do you . . . and in terms of communication, how you remember language with someone like your mother, who’s in this mist?
So that just came in. And, I am rambling on. So there’s this perspective as well. What do you think of that?
Naveen. No, I mean, it’s exactly what I said that the . . . I’m basically. . . When I say that I learned language. Now, we often, bring up our kids with books, for example, or we talk about the fact that when you read to your pregnant partner, and, it’s not just a romantic notion . . . or when you tend to read beyond their ages, as the kids are growing up, and you’re still reading things that they cannot yet decipher, graphically, and understand lettering, alphabet and so on and so forth.
I think, for me, the real language used to just happen . . . because my mother was a storyteller, she was the daughter of a man who wrote screenplays for films. And she was an avid film watcher. So you would. . . typically, we would look forward to Fridays, and I certainly was too young, sometimes I was taken where they had a reserved box in the local cinema in Srinagar. . . and then she would come back full of stories of Hindi films. And her storytelling was actually, you could almost . . . now when I think of it, visualize and see . . . and I think I inherited this business of language as image, where you throw or somehow, accidentally or intuitively, string words together, this whole act of pirona, you sort of stitch to existence an image through language . . . I mean, it’s not a new thought necessarily . . . so that ability in someone trying, almost urgently, to share a screen-image, which is moving, with a young five- or six-year-old through words.
And so, for me, I mean, it was just something that, was . . . I learned it, internalized it, all of that. I wasn’t conscious of it then. But when I looked back, and remembered in a certain kind of way.
But when the way you use re-membering, I actually had the strange visual image of actually amputating language—which is what your masters and our masters today are doing, and is certainly happening at Gaza, this whole business of reducing, stripping you to individual objects, life-forms, no, ‘animals’ is what we hear, and constantly be bandied about, even earlier, dictatorships used the word ‘subhuman’, now it’s all ‘animal’ . . .
So you’re stripping them of language straight away, right? You don’t have a sense of self, because you don’t have . . . you don’t belong in the lingua franca of something.
Right? So it’s very, very difficult and tricky. So when you said re-membering, I’m thinking of dismembering of a certain kind that is going on now in these large, open business, . . . our cities have become that. Afghanistan, Iraq . . .
So one can, carry on in this vein. But the important thing is the language, the learning of language . . . when the person who has mentored you, or nurtured you, loses [language] . . . age takes over, dementia happens, and all of that. And as I said, I was at a complete loss as to what is it that I can stitch together in words for her to understand that I am about to sanction getting rid of, amputating, slicing off, a part of her body.
Right? Because one grows up in these strange courtesies, where you seek permission. And maybe you want to be exonerated, you want to be sort of, somebody telling you, it’s okay, go ahead, that kind of, it’s not just the fact of a serious medical emergency.
But when the way you use re-membering, I actually had the strange visual image of actually amputating language—which is what your masters and our masters today are doing, and is certainly happening at Gaza, this whole business of reducing, stripping you to individual objects, life-forms, no, ‘animals’ is what we hear, and constantly be bandied about, even earlier, dictatorships used the word ‘subhuman’, now it’s all ‘animal’ . . .
So these are confused thoughts, but one is trying to constantly, even now, you are struggling with, and especially post-7th October, there is a certain extreme hollowness of language that is getting to us. We go to a place like the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is a celebration of languages, you’re dealing with each other, you’re translating from each other’s culture in the hope of finding something close to a human condition that you can share, and all the rest of it.
And then suddenly, you find yourself in a situation where, if you know the Frankfurt format, every half an hour, you’re meeting a publisher-friend and some, from Hungary to Germany, to Lithuania, Latvia . . . My tradition there is . . . I actually keep a fresh coffee machine and I make coffee while everybody’s exchanging and hugging . . .
Sabin. I need to attend the book fair.
Naveen. Here there was a genuine hesitation which was deliberate, it was almost like theatrical pausing in the hope that Sabin will speak first, right, Sabin’s hoping I will speak first to reveal where we stood. And here you are dealing with people you know for 17, 18, 20, 22 years, and you’re feeling, small—that you’re having to kind of be unsure or mistrust or whatever. And then once the conversation flowed and you realized that there was a togetherness . . . that there was, in fact, a common ground, a common ‘language’ of understanding what was unfolding around us.
At that moment, certainly there was the whole business of cancelling the award for [Adania] Shibli, and so on and so forth. But it was not just that . . . it was that what language do we now find . . . and this has happened through various difficult times, right? Lots of philosophers and sociologists have written about it. This whole business of where do you find the words, where do you find the language, where you’re being denied access to the alphabet. So all of these slightly confused notions are still to find some kind of coherence.
Sabin. Absolutely. Going back to language, and again, I’m still sort of dragging this on. You know, the remembering, Thiong’o’s ‘re-membering’ idea. And, you know, language, for me now, when I put these two ideas together, like you said, pirona, right? So language, when you’re re-membering, the way you string a necklace, you’re putting the pearls inside . . . a son doing that, and a mother doing that, you know, creating a language together. That’s when language thrives. Then there’s this other side, where you’re patching words together. You know, you’re patching words together to form a language . . . that is where the language sort of, what happens to that? Maybe that is where erasure happens. When you’re . . .
Naveen. I don’t know, it depends on the kind of erasure you mean when you use the word ‘erasure’, in the sense that, at one level, the erasure happens in a deliberate way, where you set out, like you replace and erase an entire historical language—and nations do that all the time. Or languages within a multi-language reality like ours is . . . often there’s one or two languages that wish to be majoritarian, totalitarian, authoritarian—they rule. Language erasure happens when you . . . as I wrote it in a different way, and you tend to put it metaphorically. . . you arrest speech, because you choke speech. You are only allowed to say certain kinds of things and not others. So you deny and you deny and you deny, till forgetfulness or erasure, initially forced, also happens and so on and so forth. Then there is the erasure of the mother, which is not chosen . . . not of her choice . . . in the sense that it’s not . . . You can ‘choose’ under a dictatorial presence, as I said, do you wish to stand up and face the consequences of opposing this erasure, right?
Or this opposing a replacement of a stronger language. Stronger because it has the military, police, state presence, whatever. But in the case when you lose it, like in the case of the whole Mother Muse context, to bring it back, that’s a different kind . . . it’s as if you’re . . . it’s a losing battle, and I actually have a poem there about strewing her conversations when she’s realizing that moment of almost-clarity that certain words are slowly escaping her consciousness.
And so you leave a kind of breadcrumb or a paper trail, hoping that you’ll find your way home. Of course, you don’t. So that’s a whole different kind of erasure that is not quite the dictatorial, political scenario that this world is now facing, where you’re being forced to only engage in a certain kind of articulation, right?
I mean, something in history, we talk about . . . Seagull does the History for Peace programme . . . And I was in a conversation about the fact during my photographs of In a Cannibal Time, where it suddenly struck me that you have an enforced set of historical facts being presented by the ruling powers. You have a vast diaspora—that you and I have—of a certain kind of academia which is supposedly freely writing about a certain historical incident which is different now from this new, replaced incident in the way we are taught within our nations’ boundaries.
And then you have the newspaper archives which, in my opinion, then become another target now. Because the newspaper headlines exist through all of these changes that various governments bring about. What about, therefore, art and photography? So if I’m twenty-three years ago shooting the political theatre of Manipur, which is based in the theatre person’s real life and memoir, to create all those anguished pleas as performance on one hand, or I’m taking an incident like Gujarat and the genocidal, state-led, whatever . . . What happens, fifty years later, if these photographs are discovered with references to a Manipur or a Gujarat or a Kashmir, they become remembrances for somebody to then do the detective work of figuring out whose history is it anyway?
Sabin. Absolutely. And it reminds me… in the 1980s in Pakistan, when General Zia was ruling the country . . . talking about censorship and language, you know, there were, if you look at Dawn, the newspaper, there were actually white blocks with no words,. . . The stories were actually taken out before they were going to print. You know, that’s another kind of erasure. And now when we see photographs of people, who were lashed, there were public lashings, now these are part of history and that’s another kind of language as well. And, so there’s this censorship . . . And this kind of censorship has a language that the public, the masses, the people can read into, right? So, a story may have been taken out, but that white block also tells a story, doesn’t it?
Naveen. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s what you leave out of the frame. If the photograph is successful, it hints at what is not in the frame. So, I mean, to me it’s kind of . . . all of these practices inform each other, whether it’s the theatre at one point or photography or poetry or publishing. I think it’s important and . . . you know, that one thing dovetails into another and finds meaning in that particular form till that form is attacked and then you move on to the other thing.
And for us, people often ask us about the kind of books we publish or, we often get told that you should perhaps take recourse to a legal presence that looks at every book that you publish. And my answer always is that—and it’s not out of bravado or anything else, it’s just really the practicalities—if you’re publishing across twenty-three world languages, no matter how serious that literary form is, you’re offending somebody in some language anyway . . . and in their own language, because they’re all under threat, all of them. I have a Hungarian List—most nations help you out with funding for translation and stuff—here, with every single author we publish, the condition always is, please, will you be seeking help from the state? And you say, no, because they would not want to publish.
There is this thing. But I think now, somehow, it’s suddenly moved beyond all of these concerns and there’s a kind of sense that . . . we no longer have a . . . what should I say, the language of foretelling, not foretelling like a fortune teller or even foretelling like a Cassandra, not like a doomsday scenario, even a sci-fi version of the future. I think I mean foretelling as in good old evidence-based historical research, detective work, that suggests through studying the past in a certain way that this could happen or this could happen because now the rules have changed.
A certain societal courtesy or a societal courteous logic . . . the societal courteous logical legality to which you and I as citizens should have recourse. All those have now been ripped apart, so you don’t know whom to turn to . . . and who will, be able to show you some sort of a glimpse of what possibly could unfold. The irony, of course, is that this is not new. I mean, this is something that has been going on and on and on across races and colours and,. And it’s just that . . . it’s now sort of erupted in a way that it is all pervasive now. It’s not just, I mean, if you had a multiple bunch of passports to choose from, what would you possibly choose?
Sabin. Indeed, indeed. Going back again, to the act of remembering. You said something about storytelling, when you’re remembering or when you’re . . . while you were writing . . . creating verses for Mother Muse, you said it’s not factual, and you remember the nuances. And it’s your . . . it’s basically your perspective. So that I found, really interesting, because if you’re writing a book, a book of poetry or fiction, and you’re writing about your mother or your life and it’s,. . . Can you share more about that? The perspective that is not factual, it’s storytelling . . . The journey, basically . . .
Naveen. Well, it’s not consciously crafted in the sense that you don’t have a master plan other than the aim, as I said, of sharing, right? Therefore, you have to remember. Often the act of remembering, once triggered, it’s almost like reading books . . . I read a book that you write, and it talks about a particular set of incidents which trigger a whole set of other readings, or the footnotes of your life at the bottom of the page lead me to reading ten other books to make sense of what you’re saying. So it’s really that memory thing happens, mathematically at a great speed, nothing is ever too small. It could be a walk that you as a school-kid take after you come back from school, and you have a bite, do your homework, and then you’re a companion to this woman, and you go for a long, hour-and-a-half walk, because that’s what she likes, and then you talk, and you’re comfortable there, you’re both adults, you’re not in a mere relationship, child–mother . . .
So those, when you’re remembering those, to me, it’s perfectly at ease, and perfectly comfortable to also create a memory of the moment. Sometimes it’s visual thinking that you write in a way that may or may not have happened, you write in a way that you bring conclusion to something that may have been half-said, because in the intervening years, there have been other conversations that suggest that would have been the meaning then. So it’s a very fluid . . . It’s not a rigid, compartmentalized, chronological thing that it’s at such times that such thing happened. Or when you’re philosophically commenting about her mental state or making sense of her smile . . . for her seventy-fifth birthday gift of a mirror, or, I mean, there is, of course, theatricality to it, which again, comes naturally.
One is trying to constantly, even now, you are struggling with, and especially post-7th October, there is a certain extreme hollowness of language that is getting to us. We go to a place like the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is a celebration of languages, you’re dealing with each other, you’re translating from each other’s culture in the hope of finding something close to a human condition that you can share, and all the rest of it.
To me, memory and images is a given when I’m translating into language—it is the language of drama for me always, they see the lighting, and I sense the design, so all of these things then appear as truthfully, as honestly, to the protagonists, which is the mother and the son. And there’s another protagonist which is the language, which is trying to communicate nuance to you the reader, because that is the nuance that will connect to your personal grief, your personal remembering, your personal condition at that given moment of when you choose to read that book, right? If you read the book today, feeling the way you are, you often talk about coping with a certain kind of illness, so . . . which is different from reading it while taking a bus ride in Karachi, I mean, there’s a lot of things. And each one of them . . . To me it becomes successful. And I jog your memory in a way that is the closest we can get to embracing. Right? And that, I think, is what turns it into some form of, art or whatever, literature, whatever you wish to call it.
But none of it is recollected in any kind of tranquillity, to paraphrase. It’s kind of an unbidden reaching into yourself. And sometimes you will collect three sets of memories, sometimes you will insert yourself into an inherited memory, as I do, where I’ve heard so many stories about a particular incident, but I’m not even born when I write and share and relive and depict and design that scene through words, right? Because there are no images there. But it’s perfectly natural to be and to give myself a certain age of a four-year-old under a bed while she’s dying or something. But it’s just stories I’ve heard, but those are my memories, too. And therefore, I treat them as my inheritance. So, as I said, somewhere, my virasat, this is my jagirdari, if you want to be dictatorial. But it’s, you know what I mean.
There’s a kind of, I’m sure there are more patterned, structured ways of writing a memoir. But for me, the primary thing is performing the memoir. So, I tend to live, relive all of these things. In that sense, accidentally, this business of keeping memory alive . . . what one actually does is keep that absence alive. Those spaces that the loved one has left behind are alive in a very comfortable way, and effortlessly, in some ways. That is not to say that the opposite can also often be true in some bizarre kind of way.
I don’t know if that makes sense.
Sabin. You said, and this was really interesting, because, we think when, even academically, the narrator is the protagonist as well. The hero or the heroine, they’re the protagonists. Language as a protagonist, that’s something so interesting. And you said, when you’re writing, you can be theatrical, voluntarily or involuntarily.
And here, again, I go back to saying that, as a son, or as one of the protagonists, the way you feel as a six-year-old or a ten-year-old or a thirty-year-old protagonist. For a six-year-old, we may think it’s theatrical, but for a six-year-old [protagonist], that’s not theatrical. I don’t know if I’m being very coherent here. It’s how you’re visualizing it as a six-year-old. And you are remembering that now as a six-year-old, as a thirty-year-old, or as an XYZ-year-old, right? And that’s one thing.
And the other thing is you’re keeping that memory alive through those theatrics, through those. . . these are flags through which, you are remembering those beautiful moments as well, or those moments as well. Does that make sense?
Naveen. Yeah, sure. I mean, in the sense that, I’ve often felt that each one of us inhabits so many, I mean, in fact, our being is inhabited by so many different characters, all played, as you said, in different ages, by oneself, perhaps. But the . . . just this sort of being full of a cast of characters, whichever character suits the moment, or, is able to deliver at a particular moment.
That’s one sort of theatrical device, if you like, that can come into play. But for me, when I talk drama and theatre, I’m actually . . . To me, the lines between drama and real life are very blurred, in the sense that, when actually, I don’t know, I keep repeating this, I don’t know what it means any longer, which is that I see language. So, I mean, I see the time of the language, making itself felt, whether it’s at sunset, or sunrise, or in the afternoon, or, especially the afternoons are very important for literature, I think, literature is full of afternoons, of various kinds.
At one level, the erasure happens in a deliberate way, where you set out, like you replace and erase an entire historical language—and nations do that all the time. Or languages within a multi-language reality like ours is . . . often there’s one or two languages that wish to be majoritarian, totalitarian, authoritarian—they rule. Language erasure happens when you . . . as I wrote it in a different way, and you tend to put it metaphorically. . . you arrest speech, because you choke speech.
But I see them in the sense that I can see their posture, I can see that how they walk and sit, the mannerism of language in a certain kind of way comes into play. So at that point, when you’re writing something, it’s intuitive, what you might call the ‘craft of poetry’ also becomes, part of what you’re saying. So it’s like if you were doing a filmscript, and you were suggesting camera angles and movements of this very real-life scene being enacted. Here, what you’re doing is you’re choosing moments of remembrance that actually appear to you as scenes that somebody, you can actually see yourself playing, and when you read them, the scene has worked, because you’ve remembered it in a certain way. Right. So, but that’s just me because of my insistence on this theatre and life and performing one’s life.
And I’ve often said that, at any given moment, you’re fully rehearsed. This conversation, I’ve spent a lifetime rehearsing for this conversation, because, you bring to this every moment of sharing a certain fresh vulnerability, because you decided that you would not stick to the script, or learn the lines and then speak them out, that they would have to find utterance at that moment of provocation. So the different games that you enjoy playing. And all of these things help you in these difficult times to live the kind of life, because otherwise, I mean, as I said earlier, that you’re stripped to . . . The only preoccupation left for a lot of us is survival.
I mean, what is happening in Palestine is . . . you’re just preoccupied with survival at that moment. You’re not thinking where you belong . . . who belongs, what land . . . is just . . . And that is a terrible thing to do to other human beings, is to strip them of everything.
And, therefore, language—which you started with—or remembering, or re-membering, or even an ode. But even now, I mean, the only difference is that one no longer feels that one is capable of writing an ode to . . . who will remember what is unfolding, when everybody is so busy erasing even as it unfolds, covering it up even as it unfolds.
Sabin. That is fascinating, who will remember when everyone is busy erasing. With that note, I’d love it if you could recite something from Mother Muse Quintet.
Naveen. Oh, good lord, okay. Yeah, maybe what we talked about, we could read just, just the first poem, which is . . .
She carried crumbs.
Every single morning.
The smell of bread.
Every single morning.
For as long as I can remember.
For as long as she can remember.
She never forgot to scatter the crumbs.
In every conversation.
Like puzzles. Or clues.
To help her find her way home.
Later. Much later.
When the mist from over there would begin to rise.
Stretch out. Start to take charge.
Like the inevitable damp. Cling to things. In and around her.
Then, those scattered clues. Like markers in a treasure hunt.
Those planted hints. They were the advance guard. In a war that would surely take place.
But in her innocence she had failed.
To realize.
That the first casualty would be the power lines.
Short-circuited.
The enemy would cut off her ability to recognize.
To recall her masterplan. To recognize the very signs she had so diligently left in place.
Now they were part of a geography lesson.
A map of an alien landscape. Of her own making.
sabin. Thank you so much, Naveen, for that. Just wanted to show the audience. The cover [of Mother Muse Quintet] is designed by Sunandini Banerjee.
It’s breath-taking. So, and you know, one cannot help but go back and forth, back and forth with Mother Muse Quintet. Thank you so much, Naveen, for this wonderful conversation.
naveen. Thank you.
Main Image: Pixabay
The interview has been lightly edited for clarity
