This is my newsletter #45: Sunil Bhandari

I was so ugly and bad-tempered as an infant, that my mum said she would have willingly given me away. Maybe, she was only joking. But then she did. An old family aunt, a spinster, asked for me, and I was given away, when I was all of five months, and promptly whisked away to Bombay from Ranigunj in Bengal, where I was born.

Five months went by, and I was not brought back, and neither was I called for. My grandfather happened to visit my Mum-Dad, and when he found that I had just been given away to a lonely woman in her fifties, he flew royally off his handle. He had a handlebar moustache, and when I think of him now (he departed years back), I can see that moustache bristling with fury! Someone  was immediately sent to Bombay and I was brought back home. I came back scrawnier, darker - uglier.

Life's tragic and hilarious retribution!

I feel the above alone fills a novel in my mind. Or maybe this engendered the continuum of undiagnosed pain which fills my poetry till date.

I'm sure, atavistically, our bones remember everything. And that was the reason for the darkness in the first poem I ever remembered of mine, which I found in a maths exercise book, scribbled alongside impervious calculus calculations.

My dad was a paper technologist and for long years we lived a "compound life", some of the happiest years of my life. Swimming, tennis, long evenings playing 'chor police', rounders, cards - or just sitting around as evenings brought in red-tinged shadows. Those long summers of reading, writing, indolence, friends, chatting, were some of the sweetest memories of my life.

I remember growing up as a time of luxurious waste. But in that indolence I think lay the true meaning of living in the moment. It's only in looking back that I realize how precious that time was, and how much of me has been built in the heat & the sweat & the coolness of that time.

Hear - One summer

I was pretty good in my studies. Though chemistry and calculus were battles, which I fought dourly, and barely won. But I was nothing if not forever battle-ready, and so much of what I've done - and not done - has been nothing short of of a bitter conflict inside me. I hardly had friends I could speak freely with, and things desperate to come out of me burst out as poetry.

A Poet’s Benediction

To know one day, 

that the words which I wrenched out reluctantly

from a place which only knew darkness as a culture

and brought into a world which couldn't care,

is now being read quietly on rooftops,

is being sighed upon when heard 

before sleep drifts in,

and makes someone reach out to a hand

which had been let go in anguish,

is kind companionship,

of reaching out to me to say

that my pain mattered because it 

recognized

pain in others,

and our stories cannot be allowed to be blown away

like dried leaves in lonely alleys,

and however stifled we may feel,

we cannot allow our voices to be silenced,

because a poet is a community of voices,

a collective of pain,

a general who leads armies of hope,

of what our better selves could be,

of why our worst parts needed refuge too.

I look at the sunray slanting it's will my way,

and pull a fresh page and a nibbled pen I love,

I wonder if words could capture this diffused light,

as the ink bursts into all colors of the universe. 

It was obvious that I would do English Literature in my graduation. But when I sat with my dad, he talked of practical things. That was the time when the only worthwhile middle-class professions were studying to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer or chartered accountant. My dad told me I could do writing on the side, but to study for it as a profession would forever throw me into a life of mediocre means. Nobody would marry me. He said that seriously. I'm sure I took it seriously. And a chartered accountant I became. And got married too boot.

I think the only reason I survived was that I didn't stop writing. Diaries, notebooks, margins of novels, paper napkins, inside of my wrists, my shirtsleeve - nothing escaped my written musings.

As Sarah Kay once wrote - Poetry can’t save us. And yet, and yet….

My poem on this.

It's only later that the wisdom of what my dad had insisted on dawned on me. Damned, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a whole book on this called Big Magic. I will never forget what she wrote -

“But to yell at your creativity, saying, “You must earn money for me!” is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.”

She further said -

“I have watched so many other people murder their creativity by demanding that their art pay the bills.”

But here's the thing. I wrote and hid what I wrote. I was too hesitant to share. Everything I wrote was personal, and even when it wasn't, I was unsure of its quality. The recurring thought? "Oh what would people think?"

That single thought has been the graveyard of a million dreams.

I still remember when it all changed. I'd gone to a spiritual retreat in a place called Dhyan Ashram, on Diamond Harbour Road in Calcutta. I'd written something moving in one of the workshops. The teacher, a calm and beautiful woman, asked me for an evening walk around the lake inside the retreat. As the sun looked on askance, she asked if I wrote professionally. And it was as if I was waiting for someone to ask about my writing. I told her about my suitcases of diaries, hidden away from the world. She stopped and asked - "And you don't share your writing with anybody?" I swung my head with a sad hangdog expression (I have a good one, that!).

She asked "Who are your favorite writers?"

I said "John Steinbeck and Graham Greene for novels and Mary Oliver and Brian Patten for poetry."

She asked "Now imagine, they'd written everything which you love of their work, and then kept it hidden from the world. How would that feel?"

I exclaimed "My life would be empty."

She gently said "How do you know what your work will do to the scores of people who will read it? How do you know it won't touch lives in tiny significant ways?"

That was the time when Facebook was rearing its head, as a platform of stunning reach. I started sharing there, and slowly I found fellow poets who were also tentatively letting their guards down and sharing the most vulnerable parts of their beings. 

A Life Full of Poets (or why I write poetry)

You know why I want to write poetry, she asked,

the reason I'll jettison parties and friends,

the reason a three-by-four desk is a universe,

why I find space as large as infinity inside?

To see if I could find scars under the polish as Whyte does,

or wounds growing as in Oliver's flower patch,

if I carried heartbreak like Seth's secret perfume,

or lay bruised like a land searching for Shihab's grace,

if I could caress the confused with Gluck's gentle hand,

if I could tear my heart and bleed in Shire's pain,

if I could find love in Patten's tiny shy beast,

or find Doshi holding my hand for the battle to be free.

Sometimes I feel I'm all the poets I read,

though I'm gauche, and slip and stumble and cheat,

but in the quantum of life's raw possibility,

these words show my path,

and mark how far I've reached.

A huge part of me now wanted a book with my name on it. I had a mass of poetry, and I had put it together, and I was completely proud of it. So first I wrote to all the big publishing houses; I'm still waiting for them to reply. Then I reached out to some independent publishers. Two of them agreed. But when I saw the kind of books they'd published, I didn't want to be amongst that roster. At that time self-publishing was just coming up, and I was already reading most of my books on Kindle. That's the route I decided to take.

It took me a month to put it all together. The design, the typesetting, the proof reading, the gutter alignment, the photo resolution - everything was learnt and done by me. And with a name like "Of Love and Other Abandonments", it couldn't but feature the abiding beauty of my life.

It was a runaway hit. Gulzar loved it, and wrote a message for it. When I recited a poem out of it to Javed Akhtar, he walked across to shake my hands. It hit the Amazon bestseller list as #2, just after Gulzar's new book (I will grant him that suceess!!) and #1 as a Hot New Release. But more flattering was how people related to it, and wrote in saying how much they saw themselves and their feelings and their lives in the poems.

A book is an inflexion point. And I started getting called out to readings and festivals. Friends said I was only invited because organizers wanted to meet the lady on the cover of my book! Huh! Well, people seemed to love my readings. I was getting my poetry across to people, and that meant a lot.

It was around that time that I had begun to listen to a lot of podcasts. On Being, My Dad Wrote a Porno, The Tim Ferriss Show, Blockbuster, et al. And I found an undefinable hunger growing in me to reach across geographies.

I started reading on how to do a podcast, did a couple of courses, heard podcasts on podcasts, and lo and behold, in end February 2020, started my own podcast Uncut Poetry featuring my poetry. And I told my family and friends to listen to everything twice so I would hit double figures of downloads at least!

The response was slow. And then electric. I realized it's the nature of the beast. A podcast first settles in, and if the quality of what you do is decent, it keeps growing, soon, in geometrical proportions. And soon the podcast was being heard in places I would probably have never reached with merely my written word.  UAE, Ethiopia, Bhutan, South Africa. The most listenership, apart from India, came from USA, Canada and Philippines. It was being heard in 70 odd countries, last I'd checked.

As I look at starting my second podcast soon, I am thrilled by how the transition from nothing to something follows such a predictable path - you just need to trust the dark and jump into it -  there's always somebody/something waiting to carry you through.

Epilogue

One day I talked to my mum about the time she gave me away, and how it seemed to remain in me as an unnamed bruise. She told me she'd got married at the age of 16, and was discovering her life, and herself, at that time. She was the person who had given me away, but was definitely not that person anymore.

I don't think there is anybody in this whole world I love more than my mum and dad.

Some of my favorite poems of Uncut Poetry (click photographs to hear the poems)-

I hope whatever the circumstances we are in, we all shimmer and thrive. I've realized that stardust falls on us as soon as we start anything, irrespective of whether there's a single person in the audience cheering us along - or nobody at all. 

Thank you Rohini for getting me to do this. You don’t even know how much what you do has touched lives.

Readers who have made it till here, you can get me on Instagram @sunilgivesup.

And you can follow ‘Uncut Poetry’ on Spotify, iTunes, Pocket Casts, Gaana.