PICTURES DRAWN ON WATER - K.Sachidanandan

 

K. Sachidanandan (1946-) is a bilingual poet, critic, playwright, editor, translator, and fiction writer.  Having got his voluntary retirement from Christ College, Sachidanandan became the editor of Indian literature, the English Journal of the Sahitya Academy.  Currently, he is the president of Kerala Sahitya Academy and lives in Thrissur.  He is of the opinion that he translates poems from other languages to Malayalam and vice versa to enrich Malayalam literature, train his poetic skills and test the strength of his mother tongue.

‘Pictures Drawn on Water’ is a poem in five parts written in the wake of the great flood in Kerala in 2018.  It shows the different phases of the deluge.  It visualizes how a normal monsoon turned into a fierce deluge, all of a sudden.  It also comments on the courage and resilience shown by the people on their facing a tragedy.  Apart from these, it reminds something that we lost which now resides in the memory of slush left behind by water.  It is actually a translated one from Malayalam by the poet.

“As we look on” is the very first part of the poem. Here, like a long-known neighbour, the flood comes into the house, eats, and has a siesta and then forces the residents to leave the house. The water tells the awe-struck people of the house that there is nowhere else to go.  Here, the ruthless behaviour of human beings who encroached the river’s territory by blocking its usual paths into the sea is implied.  In ‘The Boat’, a sick mother, a pregnant daughter and a son who looks after all at home, are shown.  The three quarrel among themselves for the other to climb in the rescue boat which has space left only for one.  Tragedy makes human beings selfless and death fearless.  In ‘the cat’ we see an abandoned cat that wonders on seeing the fish that tickling him and laughing at him.  Here, the poet says that when there is no branch or wall to climb upon even a cat becomes a philosopher.

In ‘Slate’ we see a slate that sits under the water in the vacant house.  It remembers the words and sketches scrawled on its grey surface by tiny hands.  It also dreams to create a new universe within its four wooden frames and thus became a part of the earth and of infinity.  In ‘Slush’ we find the slush gathered in the house after the flood with the obscure memories of fields, pond and lily and blue flowers in the harvested fields, the flower collecting children, yellow butterflies, the ploughing bulls, seeds sowing dark hands.  Through these memories of ‘The Slush’, the poet says that the things that we had lost now reside in the memory of the slush left behind by the flood.  Thus the poet has effectively used the deluge as a metaphor for social and ecological concerns in the poem.

According to the poet it was the people who forced the flood to encroach their territory by blocking its usual path into the sea. However the flood makes human beings resilient. They have also realized that the earth is not belonged to them but they belonged to the earth. Thus the poem presents flood in a favorable light.

----Thulasidharan V