Poetry With Bite, Rohan Chhetri’s Starkly Honest Collection: Lost, Hurt, or In Transit Beautiful

This is the work of a serious poet, let that be said from the start, and a seriously good poet at that. Skilled in the art, certainly, with a feel for structure and pace, but more than that he is a poet with an absorbing story to tell, and the means to tell it in an honest and forthright way. You’ll find no whimsical reflections here, or first-world obsessions escalated to tragedy; rather, you will come across the real thing: poetry alive with originality and striking images; poetry with bite. 

A Nepali-Indian writer now resident in the US, Rohan Chhetri’s work is weighted with place and tradition. A chaotic world of violence and hardship, superstition and familial love is introduced graphically in the first few lines of the opening poem, and continues throughout with legend and hard reality effectively combined to illustrate day to day existence in environments of conflict and poverty. We very soon encounter a shaman arriving in a village blowing a trumpet made from a suicide’s hollow shinbone—music robbed from the grave; people making love as electrocuted crows smoke above power lines; a relative waterboarded and force-fed earth “until it plugs his windpipe”. These are just a taste of what to expect from a series of almost matter of fact, though expertly drawn, depictions of a world a million miles from the West’s perceived ideas of injustice or privation.

Chhetri’s skill is evident in the various poetic forms he adopts; some conventional, others more esoteric, but each successful in conveying his ideas. Actually, Ideas is perhaps the wrong word, because what really drives the poetry is memory: memory translated, shaped and re-imagined, presented as a kind of mythical autobiography. In the wonderfully descriptive “BORDERSONG” for example, we learn of a boyhood home downwind of a mosque, a temple, a grimy brothel; downwind of the severed heads of Liberation Front leaders hung from the branch of a guava tree; downwind of a peaceful kingdom’s border. We hear of a doomed affair in New Delhi, and the author’s fear of running into his lover again in this vast city, which becomes too small for two; and we are told, in a beautiful but deeply sad poem, of his meeting an old school friend, not seen for many years, outside a monastery in Phuentsholing. Sebastian, sitting red-eyed on a cold stone bench, is a declining ghost of the boy he once knew, where just looking into his face:

“…was a vertiginous drop down
the cool dark of an abandoned well, & him
a thin shade at the bottom among the bones.”

It is a touching piece, adeptly handled.

His memory is used to good effect in a particularly fine poem, “THE INDIAN RAILWAY CANTICLE”, which colourfully brings to life a three-day journey home he experienced as a boy. Rattling through a land blighted by drought, religion, fratricide…, with “the sun bearing down infernal since dawn, breathing fissures into the earth”, he writes of a farmer’s suicide, of avoiding the unwanted attention of hijras and witnessing an unpleasant incident at a station. There are hucksters, lepers, “language changing every hundred kilometres” and all the clamour and stench of a crowded train, relieved momentarily by “fragrant mist rising off harvest hay in the morning”. Reading this short poem, you might feel you get a better idea of the country than any amount of travel guides could ever tell you.

There is a rather nice lyrical interlude which tempers, like a cooling draught, the heat and harsh realism of the preceding in “FISH CROSS THE BORDER IN RAIN”. It sees Chhetri and his father going down to the river on an old scooter, with the elder singing because “the breeze makes him young in the face.” They watch on as men with lead batteries tied around their necks wade chest high into the water to stun the fish and scoop them, belly up, into nets, only for them to:

“wake older dreaming brief new lives huddled
in a foreign prison gasping at each other’s
gills blinded like a sack of mirrors”

Surely that simile is unimprovable.

If one or two of the references in this shortish collection seem a little bewildering to the average reader, (and I’m thinking here predominantly of the details of political unrest in the state of West Bengal) then this is more than made up for by the absolute transparency of the sense, the feeling inherent in any particular piece. I might have said senses, because you could almost have been present at the scenes portrayed, taking in the very air of the village, the city, the countryside, such is the descriptive power employed. This is a poet at the top of his game: inventive and candid, assured but not showy, expressive without resorting to the lazy, the easy choice of word that comes unthinkingly to mind. These qualities are never more apparent than in the quietly provoking “TOWARDS SOME DARK”. It begins:

“They came at dawn, three angels
in jumpsuits, & felled the two ash trees
in front of the neighbour’s house”

and goes on to describe how a patch of blue suddenly released gives rise to the thought that this is how we arrive at clarity—“through some clearing of the living.” The idea brings to mind memories of his grandfather dying:

“…pleading through
the final hours to please pull the fucking shroud
off his head. It was the yellow mosquito

net hung low above the bed
where he lay hallucinating, furious
we were trying to ease him towards some dark.”

And with the trees gone, the wind “flits on our porch like a young unremembered thing”; but “it has lost something, & doesn’t know it, sniffing about the heavy stink of sawdust & brine”

“…like it has stepped on so much blood
drying small wounds.”

There’s something about this piece which is really quite affecting in the way its imagery and sentiment come back, entirely unbidden, again and again. It’s a quality born essentially of truthfulness.

I had thought to open this critique with a detailed appreciation of a remarkable poem which struck me on first reading, and even more so on subsequent visits, as one of the finest I have reviewed for quite some time. “LAMENTATION FOR A FAILED REVOLUTION” is a bitter account of a “long summer of bullets” punctuated by episodes of such brutality, such shocking wantonness, as to be barely credible. I was tempted to quote freely from the text, but random lines would be quite inadequate to convey the bleakness of the whole. I will content myself merely with the following, a summing-up perhaps, or judgement on that unhappy period: “Every failed revolution is a child / learning the edge of himself / every revolution is a child / grown before fire”; and urge you to read this poem in full to appreciate the desolation within the piece, and the mastery with which it is related.

Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a grown-up collection; a considered, a philosophical evocation of a culture and a history little known outside of its borders. It is an engrossing, if often troubling picture deserving of the widest audience.