Falling in love, figuring it out

How similar is a male poet's love to a female poet's?
Tonight, This Savage Rite, a book of poems by Kamala Das and Pritish Nandy reissued earlier this month by HarperCollins, holds the answer.

First published in 1977 by Gulab Vazirani of Arnold Heinemann, the book is divided into two sections -- the first holds a set of 34 poems by noted Malayalam author Kamala Das, who converted to Islam 10 years before her death in 2009.



The second is a collection of 42 poems by writer Pritish Nandy. Both deal with love, and the immeasurable hope it holds despite its many failings.

I've seen your bitten nails/ your sickly smile, heard your brittle/ Broken talk; I know you now too well/ Not to recognise..
-- The Stranger and I, Das

I move in on strangers, for the caress or the kill.
-- At Midnight, Nandy

For Das and Nandy, negotiating the terrain of love is like re-acquainting themselves with strangers, at once familiar as they are unknown. The lover must be conquered, made love to and worshipped, but the lover leaves them both wary.

For the poets, their lovers are unknowable, and their own words can do little to bridge that chasm of understanding. For love, admits Das inu00a0 poem titled The Old Playhouse, is Narcissus at the water's edge, haunted/ By its own lonely face.

Written in the 1970s, the poems are clearly influenced by Pablo Neruda, widely considered one of the most renowned love poets of all time, who won the Nobel Prize for literature at the start of that decade.
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Lines from his poem, Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines, jump out at you when you least expect it, as both Nandy and Das play with the idea of how long memory, love and forgetting lasts, and how they too are poised to write their own saddest lines.

And tonight/ I write my saddest lines, even as I declare my love for you.
-- It Just Happens, Nandy

Tonight, This Savage Rite published by HarperCollins, available at all leading bookstores for Rs 399
Pick it up: For its startling imagery, especially in some of Das' poems.

Don't pick it up: If you are tired of the stereotype of the lover with a trembling lower lip.

A request When I die Do not throw The meat and bones away But pile them up And let them tell By their smell What life was worth On this earth What love was worth In the end Kamala Das