Gauri Deshpande's Poetry

GAURI DESHPANDE’S POETRY

S. D. SHARMA
G. B. Pant University, Pantnagar

Sherwyn T. Carr opines, “She (Gauri Deshpande) is a mature poet, aware that neither passion nor disillusionment are simple emotions and the texture of her best poetry is accordingly complex. Most of her verse is marked by a sense of sadness and loss”.¹ “Anchored in the world around her”, writes Keki N. Daruwalla, “Gauri Deshpande’s poetry deals with the minutiae of every day life, the coming of a lover, the death of a puppy dog, ingratitude of children. Everything is grist to her mill, from city with its greazy caress and harsh endearments toa treescape”. ² In fact, Gauri Deshpande’s rare poetic insight has enabled her to see clearly and interpret intelligently almost every minutiae of our broken, disjointed and neurotic society. Facts for her are facts, and they are not different phenomena to her as often happens with a poetic imagination with a warped judgment. But in her scientific analysis of things she often finds the evil outweighing the good, and like Thomas Hardy, thinks human life almost a puny endeavour. The note of sadness and loss is, therefore, bound to prevail over her poetic fabric. But this note of sadness and loss is not to be construed as something linked with her sense of defeatism or pessimism: it is fairly a gleaming hope ofendurance and perseverance in a human being that makes her outcry, like a great prognosticator, about the littleness ofhuman endeavours and also the littleness of their achievement even after much labour and strife.

In her poem named A Change of Seasons, she recapitulates the bodily malaise, the uncouth emotional fits and the ever-­prevailing sense of fear and despondency. Even in the month of June, she shivered from “a deep foreboding in (her) guts”, which “made (her) breast-tips quiver /as though the long-weaned child /Thirsted again for a flow of milk.” She does not like books, because they “(books) bored me (her)”; nor does she prefer to listen to even the best audience, because “speeches annoy” her; and she remains almost breathless because “I (she) wondered if perhaps I (she) had caught something…”

In another poem named Family Portraits, Deshpande feels sorry for a family barely getting sufficient to support it. Its members present a very wry look of sadness and loss: fortitude, forbearance and poverty have made its members to draw pleasure even if they latch on a small opportunity of profit and gain by the way. They have been struggling hard all through their lives and it has made them inhuman and galoots to an extent. Their frail and feeble bodies, their bony structures, with “flaring nostrils”, “hazel eyes”, “drooped lips” and “pale cheeks” are solid proofs of their want and pain. How graphically and minutely she talks of Iru’s hypocondris and gloom:

She withheld that kingly proboscis
from us all; none, obviously, fit
to carry the fire, passion, despair,
fortitude it stamped on her.

The penury and want obliterate the vision not only of Iru but also of other members of the family. They look almost defeated and lost, for they do not see any ray of hope in their future life severally and collectively:

When we sit now,
face to face, your hand clenched
in pain, my father, and mine covering,
I see we carry the family hand:
Nail-bitten, fiat, unbending, impatient,
cut across by the ling deep life.
that would endure after much has gone.

In another famous poem named Migraine, the same underlying note of sadness and loss is conspicuous:

…you rage and pretend you’re dead.
But it’s clever, goes on–until, tears streaming
from pain-destroyed face, mouthing
long, inarticulate screams, your body
heaves up its very guts and you cry,
reduced to sweat-drenched, shivering,
whimpering lump of agony, smelling of sickness
and vomit, humiliation.

The magnitude of pain deepens further: the poetess feels that at a stage where despair or pain reaches its ne plus ultra, a bizarre kind of boredom creeps surreptitiously into our heart and mind, and then, even angels and gods cannot give us soothing and con­soling impact:

What help now? Not love,
not medicine, not gods and ancestors. None.
Only your total humility and surrender
to this fact of pain.

The redeeming feature of human body, however frail and fragile, is that it may get rid of pain temporarily. Anyone wishing a permanent and ever-lasting riddance, according to Deshpande, from pain is living in a fool’s paradise. It is a fact that it has to be accepted as such in toto. After all, pain is a part of an Integral system of human body that is assuredly whole and that swallows unabatingly all tiny human creatures. Hardy wrote of happiness in a characteristic tone of Victorian scepticism as “Happiness is but an occasional episode in the general drama of pain” (“Mayor of Casterbridge,” p. 347) so Deshpande, in a modern tone of disillusionment and boredom, writes of it as:

It will retreat in the night for a month or two,
you can resume human disguise till its next advent
and masquerade as person, sane, intelligent,
loved and desirable, Till the next time then.
(Migraine, lines 25-28)

In a very complex web of life, it is but natural to get failure on various counts. Hardly had there been a man who succeeded all the time in his life. Such a lucky fellow, Deshpande has perhaps not seen and naturally so, because the fabric of life is woven by both these threads of success and failure. But the pain in the defeat is much more everlasting than that of the stationary ecstasy in success; for, our sweetest songs, as P. B. Shelley sang long , are those that tell of the saddest thoughts. Deshpande can hardly see any particle of happiness in a social set-up where price-rise spiral is shooting up extraordinarily high per diem; where moral values are cheaper than a few kilos of meat; where an ambassador car is cared more than a wife. Scarcity of essential commodities is created overnight by unscrupulous traders, unethical political mountebanks and power-hozzled mandarins. The mam­monism as the only end of life has been endeared by us, and even children love their ageing parents for their rich inheritance. In such a complex web of life, Deshpande feels gloomy and almost stunned:

You sit with them and talk,
She sews and you sit and sip
and speak of the rate of rice
and the price of tea
and the scarcity of cheese.
You know both that you’ve spoken
of love and despair and ungrateful children.
(The Female of the Species, lines 11-17.)

It Comes Slow, likewise, is pregnant with a candid sense of defeatism and despair. Such impatient and tiring expressions like “the sea has been like a sewer these many days  nastily turbulent, foamy black”; “at low tide the waves curl slackly up the dark beach their push sucked up by storms”; “reluctant to freshen her wrinkled flabby greedy flesh” – are all suggestive of pain and loss. In I Shall Arise and go Now, Deshpande speaks of the past history and splendour with a nostalgic gloom and perspicuity. The keynote of this poem is “the poor (are) blessed with nothing but fortitude.” In The Guest, the idea of “misery and content”; of living “in disharmony” of “decay dreams”; of “barren and bereft” is more preponderant than others, and the over-all picture is again the deep-rooted gloom and helplessness. The Air Fills breathes an air of loneliness; Known in this City describes “wearisome” gaiety; “stale” knowledge; “harsh endearments”; and “flimsy” life. I Wanted to Weep reflects the ne Plus ultra of pain and suffering:

I wanted to weep for you
And me
But I had already spent
All tears in useless mournings;
So now I watch arideyed
As my fingers open slowly And let you go.

An equally emphatic note of squalor, niggardliness and wearisomeness is apparently discernible in her another poem named Two Self Portraits. One portrait ofthe self is woven by “treachery”, “crime”, “untruth”, “complicity”, “obscenity”, “bewilderment”, “protests” and “misconceptions”: the other self by those of “residues of virtue.” But she finds it very difficult to live only by one self in this world of evil designs, How loudly and meaningfully she repents and regrets:

Have I not, perhaps, just from a dream
espied a leprous being in the mirror
eaten away with desires
of treachery, crime, untruth
complicity–cruel, obscene?

Thus the pall of gloom and pain is inevitably spread over Gauri Deshpande’s poetry. She seems, in a way, greatly influenced by the modern scientific theories like Darwinism, evolutionism, geneism, etc., which have almost entirely brought about a volte-face change in the entire gamut of human thought. Her treatment of every minutiae of life and the world around her is most scientific; and as such, she finds a man almost at the mercy of natural causation as Thomas Hardy did a century ago. Yet, Deshpande’s human beings are not unnecessarily pessimistic; and she herself does not leave them entirely at the sweet will of the Hardyian President of the Immortals; rather, they struggle heroically with even a more invigorated soul and spirit. They emerge tragic, no doubt, yet they are great with essentially, human virtues even in their puny endeavours.

¹ Mahfil. Chicago. Vol. viii. Winter 1972. p. 125
² Two Decades of Modern Poetry. 1960-80 (ed.), Delhi. 1980. p. 44.