Sukrita Paul Kumar
Sukrita Paul Kumar was born and brought up in Kenya and at present she lives in Delhi, writing poetry, researching and teaching literature. An Honorary Fellow of International Writing Programme, University of Iowa (USA) 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. She has published five collections of poems in English including Rowing Together, Without Margins and Folds of Silence.
Sukrita’s major critical works include Narrating Partition, Conversations on Modernism, The New Story and Man, Woman and Androgyny. Some of her co-edited books are Ismat, Her Life, Her Times, Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature and Women’s Studies in India: Contours of Change. As Director of a UNESCO project on “The Culture of Peace”, she edited Mapping Memories, a volume of Urdu short stories from India and Pakistan. 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 published by Macmillan India and prescribed by the University of Delhi.
A recipient of many prestigious fellowships and residencies, Sukrita has lectured at many universities in India and abroad. A solo exhibition of her paintings was held at AIFACS, Delhi. A number of Sukrita’s poems have emerged from her experience of working with homeless people.
A Tale Untold
(Dedicated to Sadhna Naithani)
This way or that way
Whichever way
Chaubeji looked
Tales spilled over
Tales told and retold
Squirrels scurrying out of
his eyes, his ears
Baby hedgehogs stumbling from
his hairy nostrils
Stories climbing up his legs
Nawabs and begums
Rajas and ranis crawling all
Over him as red ants
Their pinpricks and bites
Traveling from Gopalpur
To London and back
In English
the spice and sting
softened on entering
the white ears
of William Crooke
Ladoos became chocolates
mogra turned bluebells
The many tongues of
Pandit Ramgharib Chaube
Flapped smartly,
From Avadhi, Braj, Khadi boli
Bhojpuri and even Sanskrit
And Persian
To the language of Englishsthan
Fanning people’s imagination
from the times of creation
in the United Provinces
More and even more
Stories surfaced
from deep tunnels of memories
and poured into the
already full cauldron of
Chaube’s mind
The mind that swung
into swirls
and circles of insanity;
Invisible to history
a whole century deaf
He lay mummified
Packed between the covers
Of his handwritten book of tales
Until stirred by the smell of
Ink in the pen of a fellow traveler
Once again
The squirrels came scurrying
out of his eyes
And the pigeons flew from his ears
In the Folklore Society of London.
Memories
Your shriveled
Winter bark
Is a mere mask over
Those chirpy moments, tunnels of
Dense exchanges, breezy quarrels
Those hours of snow meditations
We soared through the skies
To the sounds of
The universe
The autumnal fall
cannot shed them all
Remember,
I am not the summer green of your
Leaves that comes, teasing you
Again and yet again
On this wakeful
winter morning
I see it all
You are in fact
Empty of your ghost…
I see it all
Today too
Wrapped in that same
green shawl
That ageless spirit
Emerges from the nowhere
Of tall keekers of
Jehanpanah,
Gently stepping
through rows of shadowy trees
as on other mornings
tiptoeing
thief-like
in search for another form
an oak, a chinar or
perhaps a peepal
The birds twitter
on my branches
As the mountains slide
into the jungles
on the plains.
To You, Whoever
I hear you in the
Veins of the peepal leaf
Loud and clear
Lit up in the grains of sand
in the afternoon sun
blinding.
I see you appear
In the ripple of the
Baby’s giggle
When you slither back into
the snake hole
I know
the world will end.