Suniti Namjoshi is one of those writers of Indian English poetry whose publications appeared from Writers Workshop, Calcutta in the initial stage and P. Lal published them as per the policy of the workshop entertaining no-man’s poetry. Born in 1941 in Mumbai, after her primary and college education from different institutions, she qualified for the IAS in 1964, worked for a short while in her administrative capacity, took leave from, moved to overseas for further study, finally left the job, did her master’s degree from the Univ. of Missouri and her Ph.D. on Ezra Pound from McGill Univ. She taught in the English department at the Univ. of Toronto.

Suniti often takes to poetry casually and writes what she feels it, laying it bare the feminist heart tending to gay literature, the poems of a different taste and tenor, coating with layers of meaning. Feminism is on her agenda. Even though she started, the promise could not see fruition into good blooms. Though not a poetic genius, but still a famous poetess on the margins, sidelines of it.

She often sets her poems under an uncommon setting, letting it mean otherwise and often placing us in a confused state of taking it. What does she mean? We know it not.

In Columbia, everything is o.k., but what is wrong with after all? She views the houses, the trees and the squirrels which are but a common scenery. The houses are in a row. Trees are orderly, but what is disorderly is the news about the bird lying dead on the street. The bird, which is lying dead, what bird is it? Does it refer to violence in a covert way? Accidents mar today’s life, and these are bound happen.

Columbia, America

In Columbia, America
The little houses grow,
White, sometimes yellow,
All in a row.
The trees are orderly,
The squirrels discreet,
And the only jarring note
Is a bird in bad taste
Lying dead on the street
Accidents will happen.

And She Wrote Her Poems

And she wrote her poems because muteness
terrified her,
seeing, as she did, in the level lake water
an upside-down swan.  

And She Wrote Her Poems is a small poem telling of how poetry was born out of loneliness which a woman feels it in life. But in the lake the swan too can be seen breaking the lull. Or the swan’s imagery may haunt her typically paddling through and flapping wings to bolster.  Silence must be broken as the things come out of tranquility. Why is she mute? Unmute her to hear her.

Once I Saw is a reflection over the Ganges and Kashi seen through the prism of the morning light, playful and sportive childish remembrance, going down the memory lane, peeping through the window into time gone away, a thing left to conjecture and random reflection. Here she tries to identify with the throng in the temple for their turn to come and the corpse carried over to be burnt in the river. But she as a child keeps playing, likes to be ferried by the boatman for a joyride.

Once I Saw

Once I saw the Ganges in the morning
And almost knew then why they called her “mother”,
Those others come to Kashi to be cleaned.
We played upon the bank with bows and arrows,
We three alone, my brothers and I,
Never thinking that the throng in the temple
Was us, never guessing that the corpse
In the river was us. We played. That was all
Till the boatman ferried us over, where
The weavers lived and worked, and seeing ourselves
In the looms, we knew our kinship then.

During the night, insects keep making small sounds which the poetess keeps abreast of, but side by side there is rustling inside her heart. Taking the heart into confidence, she wants to hear what it relays, but finally reclines to her chamber. Her protagonist is a female speaking to a female, a womanly self to a womanly self, but what is her intention we do not know it. The fabric of life is an intrinsic weaving of the complex and compressed pattern where alignment is the main thing.

At Night

Listen heart,
The small sounds,
Insect life.
There’s the rustling inside.
The rustle of silk?
My breath caught
Till I shrugged
And went back to sleep.