In search of lice and love

Imagine your sister checking your hair for lice and finding a single white hair. Now imagine all the ways you can describe it. Think of all the images you can muster. Would you have gone for “My head in the sheets / and my sister’s fingers extracting white flakes and tugging / at a stray silver hair like a horse galloping through a quiet / moor.”

Just play this scene in your head. The image bears repetition. It bears a closer look. A stray silver hair has been likened to a horse galloping through a quiet moor. This is quite a somersault of perspective. Something hair-thin, something nanoscopic has been given the gift of a cinematic long-shot. You can feel the caress of an extreme zoom-in even as you float in the wide skies of an epic full shot.

The poem is called In Search of Lice and Love . It’s about sisters. In the last line of the poem, the hair which had turned into a horse turns again into something else, something that finally seals the crazily finicky but tender bond between siblings. “Let my hair be the rope I use to draw tenderness / out of our clumsy pair like from an old, determined well.” A hair is a horse is a rope, drawing out love.

TerrariumUrvashi BahugunaThe (Great) Indian Poetry CollectivePoetry₹350

Urvashi Bahuguna’s debut poetry collection, Terrarium , brought out this month by The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, is astonishing for such inventive acts of attention that she brings to the smallest of things that make up the world around her. Whether it’s the place she grew up in, the fleshly realised Goa of her first section, whether it’s the love that she has outlived — which had left in its wake “headaches the size of Crete” — or whether it’s her family which, like all families, taught her the words she uses to talk back with them, Bahuguna inhabits her world by holding it still, prising it open into always striking, often counter-intuitive, and sometimes incredibly moving images.

In the second section of her book, which is my favourite, she prises open the debris of a past love. We’ve all outlived some loves. And they’ve been terrible and rancid, gorgeous and irresistible. Usually all these things together. So when those ships finally sailed, what washed up ashore? What traces refused to leave, what impressions still knocked on our door, what memories came back to collect their debt? Bahuguna collects all these intangible objects from the shore of a past love and sets them in little terrariums of their own, temperature-controlled and glass-fronted, and observes them closely. Reading them for signs.

In a poem called Simmer , she recalls what initially seems like a little harmless memory of two lovers sharing tea. But see how she weaves in menace. From the jaws of a quiet, well-mannered moment, she extracts a premonition.

“…Someone told you not to learn / how to make tea,” she writes,

“…that you would always be

making someone else a cup. I should have

understood you were warning me: I could not

count on you. Any table we would share

would be catered by me. You would offer

what only needed to be poured.”

This is the fantasy of love getting stuck in the throat, becoming the fish-bone of gender. This is the drama of asymmetry, that little devil stalking our intimacies. Who is catering the table, who is only pitching in with pouring. Will an early love survive this?

In the poem that immediately follows this one, the poet holds onto “The Good Memory” (also the title of the poem) against all odds. She visits and revisits it. She describes it, and then begins to describe it again. Each word is a means to preserve that memory, a talisman to turn it into a bulwark holding back other memories, possibly darker, possibly more depleting, that must rush in to stake their claim.

She chooses to remember “this one” instead: “In this one you are washing hands in the basin. / The sheets are twisted into ropes to wet & scrub / new stains. A whirling pool of pink sliding / into drainhole.” Later in the poem, the poet writes that she didn’t “know a protocol: / never having bled on a boy’s sheets before” but seeing him “hunched over a running faucet / firmly tilting and tilting cloth till the water circles clean”, he “looking back once as if to remind me this is ordinary”. She remembers then, that the guy seemed practised, at least then, in “the art of being decent in a moment”. To be decent in a moment is not enough to sustain love but it will do as a redeeming memory. The poet holds onto this one, sets it in relief. Doing this gives her relief, consoles her loss. It consoles our losses too.

Be it places, Goa or Bombay or London, or people — parents, a school geography teacher or a lover — Bahuguna’s art of description can find in them both redemption and “losses unnamed in almanacs”. Hers is a very keen eye. We would do well to follow it.

Akhil Katyal is a poet based in Delhi

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