|
Manijri Indurkar talks to Arjun Rajendran about her chapbook,
Dental Hygiene is Very Important, and the experience of working on FIVE. Read a poem from the chapbook |
ARJUN RAJENDRAN
|
Why is dental hygiene very important?
|
MANJIRI INDURKAR
|
All my paranoia seeps into my poetry. My poems find route in all the events of my childhood. If certain incidents had not happened, poetry probably would not have happened, and the health anxiety too would not have happened. Dental hygiene is very important because I literally am scared of losing my teeth, and at a metaphorical level they represent losing my childhood, my innocence, and I am trying hard to hold on to that.
|
ARJUN RAJENDRAN
|
Can your title poem, or maybe this entire collection, be thought of as a root canal then?
|
MANJIRI INDURKAR
|
A root canal is curing a disease, a cleansing of sorts — a painful one; my diseases can't be cured.
|
ARJUN RAJENDRAN
|
Why is this the title poem of your chapbook? Is it because it's the poem that matters most to you, or is it because it is the poem that defines the spirit of this body of work?
|
MANJIRI INDURKAR
|
I think both. It does set the tone of the book. The theme I am trying to explore through this poem is a prevalent throughout the chapbook and this poem is also an admission, a rather direct one.
I am addressing a lot of my fears and bringing together a huge part of my childhood in this one poem. This is nostalgia in its ugliest form. The image of my grandmother scrubbing clean her teeth inside a locked bathroom for me is about the abuse that is almost a routine, to such an extent that it stays hidden or rather, unseen. |
ARJUN RAJENDRAN
|
The easier, and more conventional approach to titling a poem about abuse would be to use words that instantly drawn the reader in through familiarity- I feel you are doing just the opposite. Is this risk-taking voluntary? Also, you begin the poem with a shocking image from the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, of a man who loses all his teeth at a go: I find this eerily spectacular. How did you think of connecting a national tragedy to personal trauma?
|
MANJIRI INDURKAR
|
I think it is the way I want to approach violence. My goal isn't to start a dialogue on abuse, I am just trying to tell my story, the way I experienced it. So I cannot go for the conventional approach because my experiences weren't conventional. And I have an over-analytical mind that forces me to see beyond the overt, I tend to find reason in everything, I am not holding grudges for whatever happened, nor am I rationalising it, it is the way it is. So I couldn't have given it any other title.
Like summer holidays and childhood games, violence was just functioning at the same time and not really interfering with my other activities, not the way it is now. So it wasn't a risk I was taking, I was just being honest. My inner child won't have it any other way, and I cannot deny her that right, that agency. The Bhopal gas tragedy in a way is a personal tragedy for me. The image of the poisonous gas penetrating through the window without permission is such a gross invasion of privacy. The tragedy has always been on my mind, because it entered the life of my loved ones and slowly killed many of them. But this particular incident that my dad narrated to me was more horrifying that all the cancers and deaths I have seen in my family. Imagine witnessing the falling off of your teeth! It's so sudden, you are utterly unprepared for it, you only feel like you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it's something I have often felt. In my childhood I would often wonder why this is happening only to me but children often isolate themselves this way. The feeling of being at the wrong place at the wrong time seemed logical at the moment. So I decided to go with it. But of course many other emotions set in as I grew older, but I wanted to evoke that first sentiment through this poem. |
ARJUN RAJENDRAN
MANJIRI INDURKAR
|
Are there any insights/experiences/take-aways that you’d like to share about FIVE, our collective project?
Being a part of this collective has been a real learning experience for me. I have always been very invested in the art of criticism. I genuinely believe that without criticism an artist cannot grow. So when Nandini Dhar invited me to join this project this was the first thought that crossed my mind — that I will get to learn a lot from poets who are my seniors, who have written way more than me, and published way more than me, who have perhaps a more nuanced understanding of poetry. And that is exactly what happened. I have learned so many things about structures and syntax, I am experimenting way more in my work today and I attribute a lot of that learning to this collective, and the process that we went through together. This coming together of a group of poets who are reading and peer reviewing each other’s work with honesty isn’t something that is happening at all, not at least in the Indian English writing scene, and that is what makes this collective so unique.
|
*
