Poems from Maximum Love in Patel Nagar have been featured in The Dreaming Machine n. 13
Paulami Sengupta’s first full length, English language poetry collection, Maximum Love in Patel Nagar (Red River, 2023, 66 pages) entices the reader from the start with its dynamic visuals and language, starting off by depicting the large subdivision of West Delhi, Patel Nagar, that is both backdrop and living ingredient for many of the poems in the collection. Unsurprisingly, the perspective of the black and white photos that recur in the 3 section breaks that make up the book are not taken at eye level, but rather from above, perhaps from a balcony with its edge lined with flower pots, looking from a much greater height at the people, the different means of transportation and even the natural elements. Though the subject of a lens and thus realistic, the images evoke a sense of estrangement, perhaps what you feel when you have moved to a new city, like in the biographical circumstances of the poet. The images require the viewer to make sense of them: in spite of their simplicity and quotidian status, they are perceived with the eye of a stranger who is looking from above and is not willing to take things at face value.
The same kind of work is required of the reader when approaching the 34 poems, with their deceivingly simple titles, often consisting of one word (Hungry, Waiting, Distance, Terrace, Ready, Chore, etc.), and often seemingly having the limited ambition of providing a simple tableau. In the first section, explicitly set in the poet’s new neighborhood, out of 7 poems 6 contain the name of the titular district, declaring on the surface that each is registering different moments in its life: Winter, At Night, Fridays, Mornings, Knowing in, Maximum Love. However, as we delve into each of them, we realize the complex nature of everyday life, a sort of contemporary, modern day magic by which, for example, people line up in front of an ATM are “trusting unknown rays of sun / and seeing them turn into gold. / or […] Mannequins stare at you in ‘rapt attention / as you get out of the cab / and ask for change in halting Hindi./
Language itself is part of the experience of estrangement and unsmooth progress forward that envelops the poet even in her new job as a teacher, with two of the poems in the second section devoted to the experience. Attesting to such halting relation with reality, for example, is her last glance at herself in the bathroom mirror before braving the one hundred and sixty eyes punctuating /the hour of the bad teacher/ in her classroom: /Old dreams rush against my knees /drilling the sand against my ankles / […] but my lessons lisp in memories / of my glistening appetite/. As we progress from “Bad teacher” to the slippery slope of “The indecent teacher”, the poet deploys an entomological metaphor and transform into a bee:/ My tentacles crept along the corridor /like blue spiders / and the students magnanimously conclude: /”Poor ma’am, what a pest”/.
As the poet herself confesses in the Acknowledgement section: “Anything I write has its roots in love and anxiety. As I climb up the ladder of words in search of a poetic expression, the desire to say something is irresistible but the steps are uncertain”. These feelings emerge throughout the collection, as Paulami Sengupta is unrelenting in her determination to not fall prey to fake sentimentality, and record life’s awkwardness, even in simple acts. One of the best examples is her treatment of the spontaneous urge to organize a picnic at the beach:
/Clutching the mat and the evening desperately, I
feel picnicesque — the beach glistens like a slice of
coconut.
It’s time to float happy and saline — with plastic bags
— hobble ashore, scribble about Mondays on screens
— and then wash off.
War on emoting is practiced even when meditating about metaphors, in a territory that could lead one to wax poetic, she resorts to paradoxical, estrangement-laden pairings, that move metonymically, summoning adjacent elements in the space of a seemingly mundane poem. In the case of “Metaphors May Lack Moisture”, the setting appears to be a balcony with plants suffering through her neglect and a friend/ or beloved whose face she is touching: Dry wrinkles can’t be described with metaphors /Rather metaphors may lack moisture and warmth /and read like bare branches/ Bare branches look unfriended. / Leave the trees alone. /Let us stay in touch, /And be perfect / Like the pronounced orange darkness inside pumpkins. / A powerful conclusion to the poem that injects the moisture lacking in the metaphor inside the final image itself, with a critical eye towards contemporary notions of connection and perfection.
This type of operation occurs in many poems and readers will certainly be rewarded by carefully combing through the three sections, letting themselves be impressed by their richness in imagery and linguistic skill, which, I think, fortunately for us English readers, we can access through her writing in this language. She explicitly addresses her quandary related to choice of language again in the acknowledgement section: “Bengali or English? Am I paying enough attention to my mother tongue? Am I creatively proficient in English? What is the language in which I dream of empty hostel corridors or crowded markets? The poems in this collection do not resolve these issues, they are just an attempt to arrest this act of running around. “ As a reader and reviewer focusing on transnational aspects of literature, again I must reiterate my luck in being able to read her work in English and I look forward to her next collection, in whichever language she may choose, hoping to be able to access it in translation if her language of choice will be Bengali.
Paulami Sengupta is a publishing professional based in Kolkata. Her poems (in English and Bangla) and translations have been published in Kabi Sammelan, Nether, Cold Noon, and The Sunflower Literary Collective. She has co-translated the Bengali edition of Salome: Woman of Valour by Adeena Karasick (Boibhashik Publications, 2020). Her recent collection of Bengali poems (under her pen name Anjashi) is titled Bayosandhir Haraf (Boibhashik Publications, 2021), her most recent collection of English language poems is Maximum Love in Patel Nagar, Red River 2023.
