Book One review: How Sharmistha Mohanty’s prose poems upend conventions of genres

The word ‘novel’ felt both the closest fit and deeply inadequate to convey the radicalness of the text, the way it chafed against conventionally understood genre boundaries. In the prologue to Five Movements in Praise, Mohanty had written about creating “(…) a fictional work where the landscape and the human have equal presence, and whose pleasures are not in the fulfillment of narrative expectations, but in the creations of new pathways of desire in storytelling.”

Reading Book One, Mohanty’s very first book (originally published in 1995), recently republished in an all-new edition by Westland/Context, I couldn’t help but be reminded of this ‘concept note’, so to speak. Because Book One feels — in the best possible way — like an early effort by the author to achieve exactly the kind of literary hybrid she’s describing in the above passage. At just under 150 pages, this is an array of prose poems about memory and mortality, about love and loss, about solitude and solipsism. The word ‘belletristic’ comes to mind —writing that privileges aesthetics and elegance over formal rigidities and conventional structures.

A commentary on our notions of freedom, free will

Virtually every chapter (ranging from a few lines to a few pages) here gives you something inimitable, a startling image or insight or counter-intuitive emotional truth that makes you stop and think about what you’ve just read. In a segment called ‘My Mother’, Mohanty provides a short, sharp sketch of a mother-daughter equation — it has more flesh to it than a lot of novels offer through their entire page-span.

“‘But what about my pain?’ she asks, and throws all her despair into my arms. At this close distance her pain loses its metaphorical, imaginary quality. Her despair is mean, small and ugly, it spills over my arms, into the room, and out onto the street. My mother is so real that I can never pass right through her.” (‘My Mother’)

Sometimes, Mohanty achieves the same disconcerting effect through artful juxtaposition, the order in which these segments appear on the page. For example, the entirety of a two-line segment called ‘Flight’ goes like this:

“Something flies out of her to him before she can tell it to fly. Something lives inside her for him that works completely unbidden, that is free even from her deepest desires.”

And immediately next to it lies a segment called ‘Bird’, a blow-by-blow account of the narrator freeing a wounded bird that’s inadvertently trapped in her house. The two segments complement each other and together they form an oblique, subtle commentary on our notions of freedom and free will.

Some of my personal favourite segments from Book One pertain to death, specifically the death of the narrator’s father. There are moving descriptions of the narrator’s mother as she starts to embody the hitherto abstract category known as ‘widow’ (the narrator’s bemusement soon gives way to something that’s not quite pathos, but a lot like it). Sample this passage, for example, in which Mohanty describes a house in mourning with chilling precision.

“The front door is open like a flung-out arm and no one stands there. At the top of the stairs are the people, not scattered at random, but pressed flat against the walls in the long hallways. There is a cousin, not seen in years, who now with head bent and brimming eyes comes close, too close, and touches me gently on one arm. The kitchen is deserted. The coal fire has not even been lit and the milk lies uncovered in the kansa bowl, waiting to be boiled. There are flowers, but only white. And no one, no one will raise their face and meet my eyes.”

The recurring binary themes

Like with Five Movements in Praise, there are sections where Mohanty adopts a mode that resembles literary criticism, almost. For that book, this mode meant musings on the work of the German composer Richard Wagner and the Pahari painter Nainsukh of Guler. Here, in Book One, Mohanty gives us a segment that uses a Tagore story to talk about the inscrutability of love — the impossibility of defining it, the improbability of ‘possessing’ it ad infinitum. Even as you’re reading this segment you’re questioning your preconceived notions about love, romance and the idea that art is inherently easier to understand than to describe.

Eventually, of course, self-aware texts like Book One start to ‘teach’ the reader how to get the most out of the writing; another trait that’ll endear the book to patient readers. Mohanty’s Extinctions, published last year, also had this quality to the writing. It’s a sign of a true original, of a text that has very little by way of literary forebears (although Mohanty talks about the influence of writers like Marcel Proust in the book’s afterword). As Book One pulls the curtain down on its third act, the individual segments become all the more propulsive. The very last segment, titled ‘Solitude’, ends up tying a lot of Mohanty’s recurring ‘binary themes’ together — freedom/confinement, nature/nurture, body/soul.

“I do not know what impels me in these white, light solitary rooms. There is a reed mat, smooth and luminous, on which I lie. If I fall asleep on my side the weave of the mat leaves a pattern on my face. There is a table and a lamp for the night, a mango tree by day, and my soft, crumpled sari always. The sari can contain everything, the body and what rises from inside it. There is nothing else in these bare rooms and when someone comes they fill all of this to the brim.”

Book One is a challenging read, but it’s a high-risk/high-reward scenario from page one. Savour it slowly and deliberately, back-pedal and re-read and you’ll find yourself with images and phrases seared onto your brain.