Ticket to Ride | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Ticket to Ride | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Written by Priya Kuriyan |Published: January 26, 2019 12:21:48 am

Ticket to Ride

A rich, immersive book of verses and visuals inspired by the arterial systems running through two bustling metropolises.

                Over and Underground in Paris and Mumbai
Karthika Nair, Sampurna Chattarji, Roshni Vyam, Joëlle Jolivet
Context
144 pages
Rs. 799

In February 2016, poets Sampurna Chattarji and Karthika Naïr met at the Kala Ghoda festival in Mumbai and decided to embark on a journey that would, in two years, result in a book of beautiful epistles dedicated to the arterial systems that throb through their respective cities; the local rail networks — the Paris Metro and the Mumbai Suburban Railway.

Over and Underground has two exceptional poets from India, riffing off each other using a genre of collaborative poetry called Renga where the last line of a poem becomes the opening line of the next one. Accompanying them are two artists; the talented Gond artist Roshni Vyam, who joined Naïr on her train rides in Paris and the French artist Joëlle Jolivet, who along with Chattarji, plunged into the bustle of Mumbai’s local trains. The result is an incredibly rich and immersive book of verses and visuals which are at times humorous, at times reflective, often elegiac and most importantly, humane.

The book itself is unorthodox in its form; split right down in the middle with the second half (or the first, depending on which way you choose to open the book) turned upside down. Twenty poems are tucked away between two hardback covers. Through much of the book, one follows the gaze of the poets as they surreptitiously take in the cacophony of urban commute. One encounters the usual suspects, like the migrants in Chattarji’s ‘Churchgate to Charni Road’: “a succession of men/pouring into the gap/between the tracks/ their bodies thin/ undernourished/ overwhelmed/ this procession/ of many-one.” Young lovers from Naïr’s ‘Lines Before and After (shock): “And just across the aisle, a barely teenage couple sample/ kisses, discover the calligraphy of courtship: and inky index/ finger drawing whorls in fuchsia from the well of a neck,…” Transvestites, tourists, toddlers, buskers, bhajan singers, boors. You have seen them all, but both Naïr and Chattarji, through their verse, jog your memory of them by lending us their compassionate eye, often presenting readers with contrasting tableaux. For instance, if in Naïr’s ‘Line 7 Homistan’, a posh Parisian mother allays her son’s imaginary fears of the stalled train, (that he has anthropomorphised in his head as a living being) feeling pain at being jabbed at with needles in order to be resuscitated, in the following poem ‘Shuntings and Sidings’ by Chattarji , a Mumbai fisherwoman confronts the very real fear of her underage yet working son falling off the edge of the moving train while he’s “winding a length of cloth/ into a circular pad which he will/ place on his head with the skill/ of one who knows that sloth/ is a masque for in-between/ train’s arrival and departure/ a slowly widening aperture/ into which the next scene/ can be inserted, sans waver, baya- haath- ka- khel sass.”

Then, there are those endearing moments like the one in ‘Lines 2 & 6 Excursions (mostly) overground with R’, where Naïr watches Roshni making a fleeting connection with a French preschooler: “Blithely heedless, each, to tungsten/ edict Number One — unwritten — / of urban commutes: Though shalt not/ meet thine underground-neighbour’s gaze, nor speak to them/their child/ canine.” (The line appears in more than one of Naïr’s poems, underlining the idea of the reserved Parisian.)

However, these are not just poems about a menagerie of strangers whose lives are briefly (and, sometimes, literally) intertwined in the forced confinement of train compartment. Both Naïr and Chattarji evoke a world of memory and contemplation through their work; the sort of contemplation that happens once the din of train has receded into a kind of background noise and our mind glides into other realms of thought.