"...Yuyu takes my
breath away with the unexpected and the new. He has an unwavering
capacity to startle with the perfect image, with his attention to small,
revelatory detail and his sly, understated humour, often directed at
himself."
Book launch – Yuyutsu Sharma – 18
February
Lost Horoscope/Pratik South Asia Vol
18 No 1-2
Photo by SN Misra
With the words of Yuyu’s own invocation
at the beginning of his new volume of poetry, I greet this gathering of book lovers:
“Believe me,
I’m risking my life here
coming out in the open
to sit in Café Mozart
to resume my routine
of pouring sparks
from my tamed sleep
onto the pages of my moleskine
notebook that had remained
blank for more than a year.”
Namaskar distinguished guests, friends
and Happy Maha Shivaratri.
I’m delighted to join you to celebrate Yuyutsu
Sharma and to thank him for risking his life at the Café Mozart, for resuming
his routine with his notebook and for unravelling the vermilion thread of his
lost horoscope, inviting us into that most intimate space of birth chart and
poet’s heart.
Yuyu, I’m grateful for the honour of
speaking for a few minutes at the dual launch of Lost Horoscope and Volume 18
of the journal, Pratik.
I first had the pleasure of meeting Yuyu
last year. He appeared in an email having heard that I was a writer as well as
diplomat. We began a correspondence that led to a book exchange. Indeed, Yuyu first manifested physically in
my world as a package of books – Annapurna Poems, A Blizzard in my Bones, past
editions of Pratik. He assume the shape
that all writers take, namely a universe delivered in the most economical
confines of bound pages.
And soon after, Yuyu appeared in the
flesh when we had a long lunch at my residence at the Australian Embassy
compound. We talked for hours about
books and writing. I count it as a gift
from Nepal that I’ve had the chance to experience this country through the
prism of Yuyu’s eye and painted by his hand.
In addition to crossing paths with Yuyu
last year, I also crossed paths with myself - as in the self that is ordained
in my stars.
For the first time in my life, thanks to
a Nepali artist friend, I had my birth chart drawn up by a priest and read to
me by an astrologer who lives in the shadow of Pashupatinath. In a drawer in my
Bansbari bedroom, I have a red and gold woven pouch. Within this is my own ‘scroll of scented
homemade paper’, the sort that Yuyu writes of in his titular poem, Lost
Horoscope; a ‘crumpled calendar of chaos/ with astral lines and circuitous
loops’.
In my case, I went searching in the
stars to make sense of a brief, doomed love. It was one in a series of
exercises to exorcise the loss. A tarot card reading and numerology by a
soothsayer, a Tantric meditation retreat led by an anagarik, Sunil Babu Pant,
(not nearly as racy as it might sound to those with a stereotypical western
understanding of Tantra). I joined a puja led by a lama at a monastery in
Boudhanath, lit butter lamps, and had regular shiatsu massages with a
dreadlocked dog whisperer in Budhanilkantha.
As Yuyu writes, I was ‘Humming the
prayers drenched in the Monsoon showers/ of the Himalayan valleys/ rolling in
the world of spirits and sages.’ But ultimately, my healing sprang from the
reliable doctoring of time and distance, the medicine of all peripatetic
wanderers.
So, when Lost Horoscope arrived a couple
of weeks ago, penned by another peripatetic wanderer, I was reminded of the
universe’s love of symmetry and the comfort it takes in overlapping orbits of
space and time, something we might call destiny. And I’m so happy that my
destiny has overlapped with Yuyu’s here in Kathmandu.
I have welcomed Lost Horoscope as an old
friend. Yuyu’s wry pitting of mysticism against the prosaic is deeply familiar
to me as a way of viewing the world.
He writes of (quote):
‘a dingy world of my Punjabi town
where God was the only resort’
and:
‘a moldy world of rickety realities
a hyperbole of spirited domes
a medley of omens,
spirits wheeling in and out of our
sleep’.
But as much as I might read such observations
and think, I love this because I recognise it, because I know it; on page after
page Yuyu takes my breath away with the unexpected and the new. He has an unwavering capacity to startle with
the perfect image, with his attention to small, revelatory detail and his sly,
understated humour, often directed at himself.
In Dai, Chengdu, we meet a girl named
Xio Xio, who asks the writer ‘How old are you?’. We’re told her ‘eyes shone like
blackbirds in the white nest of her singing face’, and in her slender waist is
‘a gold-spangled ring with a tiny lotus dangling out of it’.
But romantic possibility dissolves when she
dispenses the writer with the delicious flick of her observation regarding his
age, ‘You must be Dai then, an elder brother, I was wondering how to address
you’.
In "Unstitching a California Poem," a
woman tells Yuyu ‘You dress too elegantly to be a poet from Tibet or wherever
you say you are from’. She calls him ‘Yoyo’ and, when she asked him to gift her
his tie, he ‘looked into her green eyes, and saw wild animals prowling there’
and meekly handed the apparel over.
Yuyu demonstrates an immaculate capacity
to weave his personal narrative into the warp of the historical, at once
illuminating both.
In Lost Horoscope, he writes:
‘I’ve faint memories of a lanky priest
his small-pox face, his tiny head
wrapped up
in a large white starched cotton turban.
Under the light of a marooned sky
we went to his cubicle-shaped shop
along the narrow brick lanes
leading to the main bazaar that
the Muslims of our town/ had left behind
in rush,
prior to crossing
the bleeding borders,
almost a decade
before my birth.”
The sweep of Yuyu’s canvas in Lost Horoscope,
the richness and piquancy of the tableau of characters to which Yuyu introduces
us, including himself at different ages, renders this poem at once epic in its
ambition and yet intimate in its invitation into the poet’s private navigation
of destiny and memory.
This collection underlines Yuyu’s
reputation as one of the region’s foremost poets, ‘The Himalayan Neruda’, as
American poet, Mike Graves, puts it. But as we move to the subject of today’s
second launch, Volume 18 of Pratik, we are reminded that Yuyu is not just a
formidable creator, but a talented and diligent curator.
And so we celebrate his capacity to
choreograph both his own work in the Lost Horoscope collection, and the
assembled works of others in his careful editing of Pratik. And we are grateful
to him that he devotes as much, if not more, effort to discovering and
amplifying the voices of other writers, as his own. His is an uncharacteristic generosity among
the writing tribe.
Looking at the extensive list of
contributors to the South Asian issue, it is clear that Yuyu has a covening
power second to none. And I am honoured to have an excerpt of my first novel,
Lightning, included in the collection. I join the South Asian edition as a
writer currently based in the region, and with a protagonist in Lightning who
is a Pakistani, Ahmed, who has made himself out to be an Afghan to gain asylum
in Australia in the early 2000s.
Travelling through the pages of Pratik,
has been a miraculous and joyous travelling back in time for me, to my first
diplomatic posting in Bangladesh in the early 1990s. Through this issue of
Pratik, I have been reacquainted with women I knew at that time: Nasima
Sultana, Taslima Nasrin and even Carolyne Wright, their translator from Bengali
and herself an accomplished poet who was in Dhaka on a Fulbright scholarship,
if I recall correctly, when I was posted there.
So, in addition to feeling grateful to
Yuyu for making space for my Ahmed’s story in Pratik, I deeply appreciate that
he has reunited me with friends from over thirty years ago. Another Lost
Horoscope, rediscovered. Another reminder of the way destiny calls us back to
itself whatever detours we might make. Another reminder that, however far we
might journey away from a place and its people, we are ultimately travelling
back towards them, because we walk the surface of a round earth. Because time,
as we know from Yuyu’s Lost Horoscope, is not linear.
This notion of travelling away from home
to travel towards it leads to themes in my own writing. And Yuyu has asked me to read a section from my
novel, Lightning, as appears in Pratik.
By way of introduction, my protagonist Ahmed,
a Pakistani surgeon, is recounting the story of his journey by boat to
Australia as a refugee, only to be incarcerated in a migration detention centre
on Christmas Island, off the Australian mainland. Ahmed describes his journey with
the camouflage of third person to his companion as they drive through the
Australian desert. He says:
‘The man lost everything when the boat
capsized — his photos, his medicine, his money, his clothes, such as they were,
and so on. For the first two days after he arrived, he simply lay on the grass
outside his quarters in the detention centre. He lay face down on the ground
and the grass thatched his forehead and his cheeks. He felt the earth solid
beneath his fingers, his wrists, his forearms, his upper arms, his chest,
groin, thighs, shins, the tops of his feet, his toes. He breathed in the sand
around the roots of the ground cover; he inhaled the dust. He discovered that
dust is not the same wherever you are in the world. And that sand is not sand.
The fact that the ground smelled unfamiliar was painful to the man, yet he was
glad to be attached to something that in its mustiness proclaimed its age and
promised not to shift too far, too fast, something that assured him it wouldn’t
drown him nor draw him down into its depths. The back of his head was hot with
the sun and his neck burned. The soles of his feet too. It hurt him to walk. It
hurt him to breathe. It hurt him to be alive.
‘He told the Christmas Island detention
centre officials that he was an Afghan and that he had fled religious
persecution. The other refugees knew this was not the man’s truth but they also
knew that truth wears many guises. If truth were dressed in an Afghan chadri rather
than a Pakistani burqa, was it any less the truth under its cloth? If it were
fleeing from Islamic fundamentalists in Kabul instead of an equally dangerous
threat in Islamabad, was it any less the truth behind the particularities of
its fear? The survival instinct teaches you that truth must be supple, pliable.
The molecules that comprise it are the same whatever state they take. H2O is
H2O, whether liquid, ice or vapour. The words truth uses to describe itself
must be allowed some licence, some flexibility. A brittle truth breaks and then
its essence is spilled, wasted, lost.’
And this reflection takes me back
finally to Yuyutsu’s poetry in his Lost Horoscope collection. Yuyu’s work, like
a Bohemian artist’s, embodies the four ideals of truth, beauty, love and
freedom. He writes with a raw honesty, supple candour and with great elegance. His
opening lines are a perhaps unwitting metaphor for this stance : ‘Believe me,
I’m risking my life here, coming out in the open…’
Yuyu takes us with courage and
conviction into the ambiguous layers where we are reminded of the mystical and
often painful essence of our living.
And as he races to Café Mozart, hoping
to recover what lay in the horoscope he lost decades ago, he helps us, his
readers, to rediscover and understand ourselves better, too, as part of the
crumpled calendar of chaos where destiny and self-determination intersect.
Thank you. Dhanyabad.
Photo by Bikas Rauniar
Australia’s Ambassador to Nepal, Felicity Volk has
published two novels, Lightning (Picador Australia) and Desire Lines,
(Hachette Australia). She studied English literature and law at the University
of Queensland before joining Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade (DFAT). After diplomatic postings in Bangladesh and Laos, and following
the birth of her two daughters, she began writing for publication while
continuing to work at DFAT. Volk is recipient of a grant and fellowships from
artsACT and the Eleanor Dark Foundation, (Varuna, the Writers’ House). Several
of her short stories have won awards. “No place like home,” was a prize-winner
in The Australian Women’s Weekly/Penguin Short Story Competition (2006), “Steal
it with a kiss” won the Angelo Natoli Short Story Award (FAW National Literary
Awards) and “Ite, missa est” (Go, you are sent forth) won the 2013 Carmel Bird
Long Story Award.
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