Love’s fool has a restless tongue
There is a great danger to love. We expect to find it in the quotidian, we expect it to fit in with the ways of the existent. But it is the great disruptor. It can make the meek revolutionaries. It can dissolve the bounds of convention, shatter the illusions of moralism. It can make one speak in tongues. It is the desire for a freedom that bears likeness to a most unbearable unfreedom. Hoshang Merchant, described as India’s first openly gay poet, comes to this task as a restless agitator, its high priest and goddess rolled into one.
I was the sea-driven one
Who landing built a sun-temple
Laughed at a cunt-king’s milk-teeth
Went about my sunset marriage
Casting my dead skyward
This Valentine’s Day, Navayana is issuing a paperback edition of his My Sunset Marriage: One Hundred and One Poems. The book collects Merchant’s work from across his oeuvre, and with him we visit faraway and near lands—Pakistan to Palestine, Pali Hill to Persia. We come across figures he has met, unmet, not met—Pound and Walcott and Pasolini. He talks about a love that is dangerous, lust that is bountiful. Sincere and cynical, we feel nostalgic for places we’ve never been to, for times that were never our own. For, in love, all belonging is suspect. This is the work of a poet writing in the end-times of poetry, coming down a mountain with an ancient tablet proclaiming tradition, only to upend all that he gives.
The phoenix burns its body into sunset all night long
By daybreak it is no longer bird nor fire; only song
These poems are profane (hence sacred). Devoured by a voracious appetite, spewed out as compulsive energy. Here’s god’s plenty. This is the Parsi Queen desperately mimicking Sultan Padamsee if not Jean Genet. Enter into the mother’s frightening embrace. For, there is no ecstasy without a deathly fear.
Now available on the Navayana website for Rs 399.
Who wants to roam free throughout the world
When you’d rather be caged?