Yuvan Chandrasekar (born December 14, 1961) is a Tamil writer and poet whose works bring out a postmodern aesthetic. He writes poetry under the name of M. Yuvan. He has published six collections of his poetry. Yuvan Chandrasekar's works chronicle a kind of magical realism which he classifies as alternate reality.
Five of his poems are presented below
1
The day and time of occurrence
of the Big Bang
couldn’t be estimated precisely,
because no one was around to do it.
The small ones that
followed, however, were
each recorded date-wise.
Some to celebrate the
joy of each explosion,
a few to mourn, and many
to be dismayed, unaware of the root cause,
came into being on their own.
To this day,
I’ve never crossed the road in an unmarked zone;
never taken a test without preparation;
never defaulted on any tax payment;
never failed to observe any ritual fast;
never missed a ceremony to repay ancestral debt;
and never ever arrived late for work.
Even so,
this guard who boarded
my compartment a short while ago
carrying an automatic gun –
why, how and when did he choose me?
I did not understand it at all.
Was he perhaps
alerted by the tremor
that shook me when
I walked through the detector
gate for explosives hidden
in handbag and shirt pocket,
skin and flesh,
bone and marrow?
Or was it
my body trembling like
a football kicked around
in every corner of daily life
that gave me away?
The handbag, after his inspection
and departure, is
lying open still. My hand
flinches when I think
of shutting it again.
2
I was engrossed in a near-pornographic
art film in my private room, where
darkness and silence lay in intimate congress.
Crickets helped in the background
to the man’s growls and the woman’s moans.
Appearing on the computer screen’s bottom left
corner, an eight-legged spider
inched towards the copulating bodies.
Perhaps
marveling at her breast, wide as the screen,
or taking fright at his passion cleaving the light,
or taken aback by the glowing wall’s sheen,
it drew near the right nipple and stood still.
Was it male or female?
How did spiders make love?
Was their species, too, used to watching
the lust of others as images?
Was it middle-aged wistfulness
or mere youthful ardour?
As questions on one side
and I on the other ran around
playing catch-me-if-you-can,
gasping and panting,
the play on the screen went on too.
Unaware that an extra pair of eyes were watching,
he plunged;
she was in rapture.
Impelled, perhaps, by
tact that would not violate the sweetness of intimacy,
or diffidence at watching this torrent of emotion,
or a cloying sensation, or the memory of its mate,
the insect climbed down,
splaying its eight legs,
rubbing its belly on the screen,
and walking sideways.
Luckily,
It did not turn back and recognize me.
Relieved though I was,
I shut down the computer.
3
When a black speck flies above,
scratching the pale blue of the sky,
I, too, rise and take wing – even so,
it’s only hands which have sprouted
from my sides, not wings.
When I rise, startled awake
from my slumber on the window seat,
I spread as wide as the playground
that sprawls outside and even beyond –
my waist is thirty-two inches
and my shoulders, forty across.
When the singer who died in the last
century spins and rises in the compact
disc, the music that swells and climbs ghost-like
inside me is sometimes even more wonderful
than the original – my age is a mere forty.
Unable to sleep one night,
when I search wistfully in the sky
for some consolation, a lone point of light
shifts a little, keeping me
momentary company amid the cluster of stars,
and my heart is pleased.
I am five feet four inches tall.
When titles crowd
the newspaper, television,
university and royal court,
and charlatans rule, I am reminded
of my childhood nickname: snail –
snail that always hides
in its shell and inside books.
Even now,
I read the width and depth
of the indenture of a stranger’s behind
on the beach sand and imagine
the stranger’s life story,
like the painter who
drew the portrait of a princess
from a fingernail he had chanced to find.
My antennae are not very long;
only an inch or so –
an inch
beyond the globe’s diameter.
4
When the mirror
I was looking at
slipped from my hand,
fell to the ground
and shattered,
I was watching
the mirror that
slipped from my hand,
fell to the ground
and shattered.
5
I remember
the eyes closing.
When did
the mind
fall asleep?
When did the lips,
parted for a smile,
come together again?
When the pouring rain
chose to stop and
the flower in bloom
decided to drop?
Published in Other Places: The Sangam House Reader - Volume 2 , edited by Arshia Sattar, DW Gibson and Rahul Soni, Sangam House Books, 2013
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