On Vikram Seth’s ‘The Golden Gate’

The Golden Gate is a kind of book
that leads you by force to the iron gate
or miry life mowed down by fate
that loudly laughs with a quizzical look
It gives a faint feel of American life
full of shallow show and mental strife
wretched results of the reeking riches
more dreadful than Macbeth’s witches
Does it portray life or depict death
or death in life or life in death
Still it shows the flow of birth
through love or lust inspite of dearth
The Golden Gate presents squalor
There is neither a tinge of glittering gold
nor a streak of shining silver to behold
it is packed with rusty iron and pallor

John’s life is a sombre journey
from a sordid state of neurosis
to the pathetic plight of psychosis
punctuated by fluctuating agony
By the time he becomes a man
he is deprived of the proper woman
His youth ends with no ray of hope
but in distressed darkness to grope.
Liz is neither a cool manovuering minx
nor a wise imperturbable sphinx
She is calm, warm and vivacious
bold, cold, dynamic and tenacious
while Jan’s love for John deserves a pat
Liz loves him as much as she loves her cat.

Jan’s short span is one of intense love
and loving kindness, herself a dove;
her determined dedication to sculpture
wills our hearts with ringing rapture
The short circuit of her life, her fate,
is charged with pathos at any rate
She is granted posthumous success futile
in the proud fields of art and love fertile
though the writer, her Brahma, chills her heart
and thrills in cutting her career short.
Phil with all his intellect is a homeosexual
satiates his lust by making to Ed love unusual
and wisely turns to his sister Liz to wed
whom John likes as she is a dynamite in bed.

The Golden Gate opens the gazing gate
to make free play of homosexuality
gives a versified version of sensuality
exhibitionism and perversion and its fate
The rhyme dryly sounds for sound’s sake
while the lines limp and move sense to make
His verse hardly enters the realm of
feeling nor does it convey any emotion peeling
Even a fatal accident fails to move
nor does the anti-nuclear speech prove
effective in bringing a radical change
even in the Lungless city of narrow range

Drawing dimly there are lines and lines
for something else the reader pines.
In fact it will be more apt
to rechristen The Golden Gate
as Cat’s Victory or The Golden Cat
that pleads for our attention rapt.
Often the author pokes his nose,
and proudly intrudes with a heavy dose
The constant authorial interference
is meant to be a pointer of reference
In fact it neither explains nor edifies
but often the norms of decency it defies
Is this work a poem or a novel or an epic
a parody or a mimicry or a mock-epic
Indeed it is a queer patch-work quilt
with flimsy threads it is loosely built