Arundhathi Subramaniam
<
>
Home Give me a home that isn’t mine, where I can slip in and out of rooms without a trace, never worrying about the plumbing, the colour of the curtains, the cacophony of books by the bedside. A home that I can wear lightly, where the rooms aren’t clogged with yesterday’s conversations, where the self doesn’t bloat to fill in the crevices. A home, like this body, so alien when I try to belong, so hospitable when I decide I’m just visiting. The Monk (who’s been in silence sixteen years) writes me a note at a yak tea stall skirted by ragged prayer flags in a grey hiccupping wind on the road to Kailash. His face is scarp and fissure and gleaming teeth. He spends each day cleaning his shrine. ‘It’s worth it,’ he laughs. ‘I clean the shrine, it cleans me.’ He was a spare parts dealer in a time he barely remembers before he was tripped up by something that felt like a granite mountain in reverse, the deepest pothole he’s ever known, too deep to be called love, that turned him into a spare part himself, utterly dispensable, wildly unemployed. ‘And if there is another lifetime this is what I’d ask for,’ he says (and now he doesn’t laugh): ‘Same silence. Same cleaning.’ |
Described as 'one of the finest poets writing in India today' (The Hindu, 2010), Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and author. Widely translated and anthologised, her book, When God is a Traveller (2014) was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her new book of poems, Love Without a Story, was published this year with Westland Amazon.
As editor, her most recent book is the acclaimed Penguin anthology of Bhakti poetry, Eating God. As prose writer, her books include The Book of Buddha; the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life; and most recently, Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga (co-authored with Sadhguru). She is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Zee Women’s Award for Literature, the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy, the Mystic Kalinga award, the Charles Wallace, Visiting Arts and Homi Bhabha Fellowships, among others. She has written extensively on culture and spirituality, and has worked over the years as poetry editor, cultural curator and critic. |