Poems by Sukrita Paul Kumar

Trial by Life
​
Twenty years ago
in the operation theatre
​of the hospital
 
Anesthesia awakened me
to you;
 
All at once, you emerged
from the pits of my being;
 
Like lightening rose
the voice of God
 
Blinding the face of darkness;
Green masks and cat eyes
Flashing their dangerous competence
Ready to terminate life
At its root,
 
I ran for your life
Salvaged you from
the murderous tools
of the doctor, that pursued me
And entered my dreams forever
 
I built a cocoon around you
Protecting you from evil spirits;
 
From the foetal state
to your adult being
Rearing you with
The pain of repentance;
 
The devil and God have
battled in me
 
We both burn
in the passion of your revenge
and remain suspended
Between life and death
                                                                                               
With green masks and cat eyes
All around us.
                                                                      
 

 
 
Of Gaddi(s) and Goats
 
Cackling goats and jostling sheep
Wiggle through woolly tracks
Reaching the edges of their skin
Rolling like pebbles down the Himalayan slopes
In herds
 
With several bleating little lambs 
Peeping from the kukh of his apparel
The heavy feet of the Gaddi
Drag many steps behind,
Hollering and bellowing, harking and heeding,
The threatening oak stick in the hand
Waiving at the sheep on the brink of cliffs,
The other arm cuddling the twitchy babies
 
My friend, doesn’t the pashmina of your shawl
Whisper to you, tell you of the gentle strands of love
woven into the pashm fabric many times finer
than your fine hair
In its heat you may not cook eggs
Nor will its lightness give you wings
But what you wrap around yourself
Are the dense clouds trapped in the Arctic
Ready to rain on separation
Or melt into sprightly rivers in its warmth.
 

About the poet

Sukrita Paul Kumar, born in Kenya, lives currently in Delhi, writing poetry and teaching literature. An Honorary Fellow of the prestigious International Writing Programme, University of Iowa (USA), Cambridge Seminars and a former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, she was also an invited poet in residence at Hong Kong Baptist University, China. Honorary faculty at the Durrell Centre at Corfu (Greece) and a recipient of many international fellowships and residencies, she has lectured and read poems in many institutions in India and abroad. She has published several collections of poems in English that include Dream Catcher, Untitled, Without Margins, Apurna, Folds of Silence and Oscillations. Her two bilingual collections are Poems Come Home (with Hindustani translation by Gulzar) and Rowing Together (with Hindi translation by Savita Singh). She was the Guest Editor of Crossing Over, a special issue of “Manoa” (University of Hawaii, USA). A number of Sukrita’s poems have emerged from her experience of working with homeless people, Tsunami victims and street children. Ink and Line, a book of poems written on her paintings has been recently published.
 
Sukrita’s major critical works include Narrating Partition, Conversations on Modernism, The New Story and Man, Woman and Androgyny. Some of her edited/co-edited books include Speaking for Herself: Asian Women’s Writings (Penguin), Ismat, Her Life, Her Times (Katha), Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature (Pearson). As Director of a UNESCO project on “The Culture of Peace”, she edited Mapping Memories, a volume of Urdu short stories. She has two books of translations, Stories of Joginder Paul and the novel Sleepwalkers. She is the chief editor of the book on Cultural Diversity in India (Macmillan India). Deeply interested in oral traditions of India, her most recent co-edited book is Chamba Achamba: Women’s Oral Culture from Chamba and Bharmour, published by Sahitya Akademi. A solo exhibition of her paintings was held at AIFACS, Delhi. Ink and Line
 
Currently, she holds the Aruna Asaf Ali Chair at Cluster Innovation Centre, University of Delhi.