The idea of home

It is a strange time to be reading love poems for New Delhi. Smog has clung on for over three months, and the last month witnessed a fresh wave of crimes against women. Michael Creighton’s debut, New Delhi Love Songs , isn’t a collection removed from these realities.

It simply argues that a place inhabited by 19 million people has stories worth singing about. Some poems move beyond city limits to places where “three-wheelers change colour” and “tilled earth replaces tarmac.” Creighton’s world moves between his early life in Portland, US, to his travels in India to his visceral, larger-than-life experiences at home — New Delhi. The poems range from a Neruda-esque ode to a guava to a dream in which his mother urges him to join his children as they work on an art project.

One of Creighton’s best-known works is the ghazal — ‘New Delhi Love Song’ — which the collection is named after. He simultaneously critiques and celebrates the cruelty and beauty of the city with couplets such as, “We push in line and fight all day for each rupee. / Who can say what’s really fair in New Delhi?” The rhythm of this poem, which opens the collection, is memorable but misleading if considered representative of Creighton’s work. Though he sustains the direct and accessible charms of this poem throughout, the poems move far beyond the rhythmic to quietly create microcosms of loss and love.

The people Creighton is compelled to write about are often as consumed by the idea of “home” as he is. The poet watches the people who occupy public spaces such as streets and railway platform — taxi drivers, ice-cream vendors, a chai-walla. Here they’re dreaming of or singing of home. The chai-walla sings, “There is no way home. / This is the only way home.” Their migration to places within India for employment is echoed in Creighton’s own journey away from the US. In these poems, Creighton is rarely inside his home. The home is the street, the train, the sidewalk.

Though Creighton runs the danger of telling stories that aren’t one’s own, his gentle treatment of other people’s lives doesn’t exceed his view as a bystander or a person who buys honey or fruit from his subjects. He stops short of assuming too much and creates narratives from what is visible to him and an awareness of socio-economic dynamics.

He remembers what he is unable to buy from them as clearly as what he has bought. In ‘Apologies to the Shakarkandiwala ,’ he writes about not buying the last sweet potato of the day because “Today I can’t find the stomach/ for cold shakarkandi .” There is no cloying sweetness here. Instead, the poems offer a visceral experience which brings alive the moment Creighton is describing and allows the reader to choose what to feel.

Where Creighton does lead the reader, however, is towards a realisation of beauty in hidden, unexpected places. In ‘What the Rubber Farmer Said,’ he writes in the farmer’s voice, “I, for one, could not have borne this life/ if I had not found beauty buried in the stench/ of raw sheets of latex.” This idea of “beauty buried in the stench” returns frequently. Watching the Yamuna from afar, he says, “at that distance, Shakti, even a dead river looks lovely.” There is a quality to Creighton’s perspective which sees familiar sights through gentle, forgiving eyes. He tries to bring to light what makes individual lives liveable.

New Delhi Love SongsMichael CreightonPoetry Speaking Tiger ₹299

Some of the most powerful interrogations in the text are around fatherhood. Creighton’s three children move in and out as young voices who bring home an otherwise unnoticed detail and imbue it with significance — an insect on the bathroom wall, an egg his daughter wants to bring home and hatch. Creighton’s own father makes an appearance in the poem ‘Father.’ Creighton has been tasked with saying a few words about the late father of a friend which gives way to an astonishing poem where he searches the words of poets Arun Kolatkar, Elizabeth Bishop and others to find an appropriate poem to read. When he finally finds one, he admits, “Of course it was my own father/ I was loving at that moment, / and his father, / and the father I yearn to be —/ and that seemed as honest a feeling as I was capable of/ at that dark hour.” He returns to this idea of fatherhood when he visits the astronomical observatory at Jantar Mantar, and wonders about the father of the man who built it, the father who sells coconut water outside, and his own father.

There is a gradual build-up as one progresses through the poems, learning the layout of the scene, to be led without fanfare or postponement to a knife or a clearing or a flower — all devastating in how they expose the fallibility of human lives. There are ghosts that move in and out of the living throngs. There’s a friend he “hadn’t heard…was going till she was already gone.” There’s a friend who’s very sick. There’s another for whose eighth death anniversary Creighton writes a poem.

New Delhi Love Songs is a collection where the poet embraces the spectrum of human imagination and emotion. In one breath, he imagines returning in another life as a New Delhi autorickshaw. In another, he speaks to a river and weeps. Creighton has written one of the most accessible and haunting debuts to come out of India in recent times.

Urvashi Bahuguna is a Delhi-based poet

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