A conversation on poetry and walking

Shikhandin: The idea arrived first. The poems were collected under the unifying umbrella of ‘walking’ and its many facets and meanings afterwards. I am familiar with both Geetha’s and Sivakami’s poetry. I know they are nature lovers and enjoy the outdoor air as much as I do. This does not mean any of us are into sports, though. It is just that walking has value and significance for us. Walking under the open sky and beneath trees is a profound experience for me. It is like getting my creative batteries charged. I often return home with ideas and images, and lines of verse too. So, yes, I already had several poems on and around walking. Sivakami and Geetha also had poems about and based on walking, so I would say we were off to a good start.

Sivakami Velliangiri: The idea of walking was suggested by Shikandin. It felt ironical at that time because l hardly walk these days. But, revisiting my older poems, I realized that walking is a strong theme that is naturally present in my works and it just felt right.

Please unpack the title.

Sivakami Velliangiri: The title is Geetha’s brainchild. Geetha is into music, so probably walking resonates for her like a ‘G sharp’ note. As for me, these poems are footnotes of my journal entries on walking. When we travelled or something unusual happened, I would write it down lest I forget. I usually wrote in poetic format, as that is the way I am best able to bring in the rhythm and beat of the action or event or what I experienced or saw. Not all my entries can be turned into poems, but they carry in them the first steps of poems with memories, both personal and ancestral, folklore, myth, fact and very often fiction. “Walking my poems” is my way of awakening these beings, lining them up, and animating them into life. I feel the title that Geetha chose appeals to me because of its unconscious presence in my poetic practice.

Geetha Ravichandran: Footnotes in G Sharp struck me as a unique title, a little quirky, a little symbolic and very appropriate for our book of poems of meandering journeys. G Sharp is the note that brings a higher, brighter and maybe tenser quality to the music. To my mind it brings both joy and a shrillness that can be woven into many situations. ‘Footnotes’ is a play on walking, writing and a bit of musicality.

Shikhandin: Speaking for myself, I immediately fell in love with Footnotes in G Sharp. I felt it wrapped up what we were at with these ‘walking’ poems very well. G Sharp is a walking chord in guitar music, and poetry carries music in its body and soul. In music this chord keeps me immersed in both the rhythm and the mood of the piece I am listening to; there are no sudden breaks or shifts to shock me out of the ride. If I were to take that experience and immerse it in walking, it means I am continuing with the flow of both my movement as well as that of the world around me and even the air I am breathing, the breeze brushing past me.

Do you see walking as individualistic in a collectivist culture? Do these poems also come from the contexts of your gender and social/ other circumstances?

Sivakami Velliangiri: In my student days, walking was a means of transport. A necessity. After my marriage, I started walking to observe the world and walking was the way the world spoke to me. In my husband’s home town, the men walked in front and the women followed a few steps behind.

I often wondered if it was because they had longer legs or because they thought their pride would fall if they slowed down a little.

Sometimes, walking in my poems is personal and individual. In Bringing Back Mother, my young, free-spirited mother escapes into the big backyard of our home – a place only she really knows. While relatives go searching for her, I, as a child, could find her easily because I had always followed her. Walking through the orchards and paddy fields became our little private ritual in a large family with many rules and regulations.

But walking can also be a shared, collective experience that creates a sense of womanhood. In one of my poems, a group of schoolgirls walk together, telling stories and becoming a small community of young women who are also storytellers.

You would have noticed that women are a central theme in my poems and they carry the varied experiences of women. In one poem, a young girl (the Tamil Bhakti poet Andal) walks in sacrilegious defiance into the garbha griha and is thus immortalized. In another, the child is immediately perceptive to the differences between herself and the fisherwomen. They are almost exotic and sensuous creatures who make pacts with sea goddesses, and aren’t inhibited in the way the child expects them to be. They loosen their clothes and dance in the water intended to disperse them. In another poem, the unifying experience of womanhood overpowers social divisions, as the child, now a mother, is able to relate to the needs of the women in the street play. There is an empathy that comes with age. As I get older, in my forest poems, I become a mere passive observer happy to remain in the car and observe animals walking, or my daughter as she treks into ancient ruins.

Shikhandin: Walking for me is individualistic. I do observe individuals – both human and animal! Their appearance, gait, any visible eccentricity. Even trees along the way are individuals with their own specific characteristics. Collectively, not so much. It is the individual eccentricities and unique qualities that make any culture collectively more interesting. Another thing, I enjoy solitude. My senses grow sharper when I am quiet, and I can see, hear, and feel more keenly. As for gender, well, that goes without saying. This is India, so, old or young, a woman’s gender will always announce her presence first. Therefore, this specific circumstance (of being a woman) in my life is often reflected in my writing. But not always. I am more than the sum of my gender. I must also mention that as women, and therefore women poets, we are pretty much in the margins, our intellectual expressions exist as footnotes. Not that we care! We take note of our surroundings. Our voices ring strong and true from the margins and stain the centre of the page!

To what extent does the concept of the ‘flaneur’ apply to your walking routines, if at all?

Sivakami Velliangiri: Both walking to observe and observing walking appear in my poems. As a schoolgirl, walking was a collective activity – a group of girls coming into their own, forging bonds of womanhood, and concocting stories about the unknown, the houses, and history, blending fact and fiction. In my later poems, I become a kind of flaneur: even when I am not walking, I observe and find a quiet peace in watching people and animals move. In Memories of a City, I like to think of the deity in procession as the flaneur, with us as the subjects being observed.

Geetha Ravichandran: That (being a flaneur) is an aspiration. It involves the luxury of time. So, while it’s not possible as a routine, there are opportunities when travelling. There’s no better way of exploring new places than walking through the streets. I love Bengaluru for it has great weather for walking, any time of day. There are many leafy lanes where you can saunter at your own pace. One of the poems in the book is the outcome of a leisurely walk in Tib street, Manchester. Although the street is known for its pubs and taverns, I was delighted to find the drain covers engraved with verses, which I have quoted in the beginning of the poem Street. It reads Trip and fall/between the ledges/Where sweeping /silent rivers run. My hosts who passed by the street frequently, had not noticed it. I learnt later that this was part of a poem written by Lemn Sissay and the pavement art was sponsored by the Manchester City Council. Tripping on poems is a good way to feel at home in a new city!

Shikhandin: I wish I could ‘flaneur’ all the time, or at least some of the time! I love it. Nothing can equal a long rambling, seemingly purposeless walk, preferably through places and spaces unknown! But the charm of old familiar places throwing up surprises like the shikra, India’s smallest bird of prey, I once spotted sitting on a low branch and watching me. The shikra had its eyes on me! Maybe I looked like a tasty morsel to it, albeit gargantuan! Or the common garden lizard that fell from a low branch near my feet, and sat stock-still for a few seconds, too embarrassed by its fall, I guess, before regaining its composure and scuttling off. To me, ‘flaneuring’ is a hugely enjoyable physical activity soaked in literary flavour.

Do some of the poems respond to your experiences during lockdown?

Sivakami Velliangiri: Yes, one poem was written out of a kind of nostalgia for trees and the outdoors during the lockdown. It carries a sense of yearning, not only for nature, but also for the family I missed and for childhood itself.

Geetha Ravichandran: Three poems of mine do. Specifically, two refer to the loss of family members who were inveterate walkers. Every time I walk in Hanging Gardens, Malabar Hill (in Mumbai, where GR was Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax), I remember my sister who loved walking there and also spent quite a bit of time sitting on the benches there.

Shikhandin: Yes, they do. Not my personal experience per se. I did not have to walk for miles to go home. But what I read in the newspapers and watched on the TV news channels was disturbing, to put it mildly. I have a few poems based on the Covid days, and a couple of short stories as well. This book of poems contains one poem from that time. This poem, Track Spill, is the saddest ‘walking poem’ I have ever written, and it was very hard for me to write. I still do not know if I was able to do justice to the utter senseless tragedy of a group of men trying to return home on foot, and being mowed down by a train.

Going further back, did you bring to these poems your perspectives from growing up in the time before Liberalisation?

Sivakami Velliangiri: Our needs were simple in the pre-liberalization era, which made us more observant and more in the present. Life sort of sauntered – walking to buy things, walking into the backyard, watching Padmanabhan the temple elephant on the way home, or making up ghost stories, were small joys that were often shared with others. I was sent to school by horse cart, because the taxi was too fast. Later, with travel becoming more accessible, we went on annual vacations to the Western Ghats and saw many exotic animals. But I think there is a sort of intimacy in my older poems. For instance, sharing my precious candy with Rohini, the horse who took us to school. It is a world that has completely disappeared – horse carts, shoes so precious one had to take the effort to retrieve a fallen shoe. In a non-materialistic way, things meant more to us. We were careful with them. We respected them and took care of them. Writers in my generation are perhaps the last chroniclers of that way of living. There is a deep and almost painful remembrance in The Tour Materialized, a longing for the old days when my father would show me the pyramids in hand-bound books. Just these books, with their drawings of pyramids, were enough to capture our imagination. Decades later, long after my father’s passing, I did finally visit the pyramids. In that full-circle moment, what I yearned for was my father, his passionate storytelling, and his love for his child. I don’t think being at the pyramids actually mattered.

Shikhandin: I am sure I did, though not consciously. Our childhood influences shape us. The era before television, smart phones, the internet and so on, took me and my peers outdoors to the blue skies, and the flora and fauna, and indoors as well, into the pages of books and the sounds of music and plays, and the news broadcast from radios, and turntables and cassette players. I cannot specifically say those influences are visible in these walking poems, but since they are part of me, I assume there will be some spillover.

How does your coming together for Footnotes… illustrate the relationship between you three?

Sivakami Velliangiri: We are three women of a certain age group who have come together. Despite our different lives, we share certain values. And also, now this book. I think our collections complement each other because Geetha’s poems are musical and Shikandin’s are written in a contemporary register, and mine are anecdotal. I think our perspectives and voices are very different from each other and that is what makes the triptych work.

Geetha Ravichandran: Sivakami and Shikhandin have known each other for decades. I got to know both of them when Shikhandin launched my first book Arjavam in 2022. Sivakami launched my second book in 2023. They drew me into their circle very graciously. The love of poetry, including each other’s poems, is our strongest bond.

Was your poetic relationship influenced by the poetry scene in Chennai? If so, would you please describe the scene in brief?

Sivakami Velliangiri: I co-founded the Chennai Poetry Circle in 1996. I also continued to unofficially co-ordinate the British Council Poetry Circle till the lockdown. Now, the British Council’s Poetry Circle has resumed after a hiatus, and it has a new moderator. The Prakriti Poetry Foundation, which was started in 1998, brought poets to Chennai from North India and also from all over the world. During Covid, I was a senior member of ‘The Quarantine Train’ (an online group of poets mainly from India) founded by poet Arjun Rajendran, which kept us occupied positively with an abundance of poetry. After lockdown, the Quarantine Train had to halt. Then I came to know of the India Poetry Circle, a WhatsApp group, that has a physical reading in a leading bookstore in Chennai once a month, and also an online Zoom reading where we read one poet and one of our own poems. I am also thankful for a good circle of co-writers and relatives who have encouraged my anecdotal poetry. Besides all this, I have a passion for introducing poetry and poets to the young or vice-versa. So much so that (poet) Hoshang Merchant named me the ‘Poetry Aunty of Chennai’.

Suhit Bombaywala’s factual and fictive writing appears in India and abroad. He tweets @suhitbombaywala.