The Changing Language of Stone: Review Of ‘tea and tombs—poems on Hyderabad’

Once in a while, a book comes along that makes you sit up and want to write about it. The fact that the book is from a small press and by a first-time poet adds to the pleasure. Manu S. Kurup’s elegy to the city of Hyderabad, tea and tombs (Hawakal Publishers), is one such book.

At its most basic, tea and tombs is a series of poems quite literally about tea and tombs. There are various references to tea and conversations fostered by tea, which is a cultural pastime of Hyderabad. In ‘A Grammar of Tea’, the poet notes that ‘in Hyderabad, tea is rarely just tea’ but also conversation, friendship, politics, trust and even trouble. ‘The Tea Seller of Nampally’ has seen generations come and go, measuring age ‘not in years but in conversations’. The tombs of Hyderabad remain a perennial presence, both for poetry and the city.  They watch from a distance while life moves at a frenetic pace. Time passes for everyone, and the silence returns at dusk once the tourists have left. This is the silence of stone ‘that has waited longer than memory’. It is ‘geometry transformed into prayer’. The walls have ears and they remember. The rhythm lasts even if reason fails. The bell in the temple continues to ring, even after the kingdom is gone, the king and ministers long dead.

From another perspective, the book is a meditation on time itself. What is it that survives and endures? What is so utterly banal and transient? Why does the banyan tree survive, while languages change, when ‘the tree continues its conversation with sunlight’? To exist seems to be enough, since most things do not endure.  The city is constantly changing. The Hitech city with young men and women carrying laptops exists in parallel with old monuments, and the changing ecological landscape. While ‘the living are always rushing somewhere’, the lakes are disappearing. Water is ‘patient till it is not’. The poet remembers the 1908 Musi river flood in his critique of mindless development that devastates nature. Nature is always stronger and comes back with a vengeance. The poet reveres slow time, where things stand still and watch. There are plenty of ghosts from the past who do just that in this book. Muhammad Qutb Quli Shah who founded the city, or a pearl merchant of yore, a soldier from Golconda, a nobleman of those days, or even a gravedigger.

What lasts then? Nothing really stands still, except perhaps stone. But things do change and survive. Language transforms itself and becomes different from what it was. In a stirring poem, ‘Dakhni Refuses Retirement’, the poet notes wryly like a sociologist, while critiquing the world of academia itself – ‘The problem is that scholars/ mistake language from grammar./Language is not grammar/ Language is gossip./Language is flirtation./Language is bargaining./Language is insult’. Dakhni with all its humour will ‘probably survive the conferences too’. And yet, Urdu is neglected, and with its reduced utility, entire ways of seeing start fading away. The flavour of the day however remains multilingual – English for dinner and pasta, but conversation with grandmother is in a different language. At the same time, the last Persian calligrapher’s fingers have also aged and cannot keep up with metro trains and delivery apps. The city survives, not because of rules and institutions, but because people keep conversing with each other, where ‘strangers continuously interpret one another’. Exchange is the basis of existence. To exist is enough, and change is inherent to the enterprise of survival.

The collection is also a paean to the very ordinary, the physical memory of labour, manifested in invisible hands who keep the city together.  In the book, they are ‘The Man who polishes Charminar’, the tea seller, the night watchman, the female sweeper, the mechanic, the bookseller, the waiter in the Irani café and the Haleem stirrer. They make the city, but no one acknowledges their worth. History books are silent about them, but those hands know better.

While at work, they are the ones who pay attention to the city’s rhythms. The city runs because of them. The poet values attention, dignity, listening, taste, maintenance, observation and patience over modernity, progress, speed, efficiency, productivity, glamour and dazzle. He knows the dazzle of today will soon pass, and all that will be left is conversation and silence. Knowledge has more time than readers, and transformation is ‘simply time wearing ordinary clothes’. 

What is remarkable about the book is how words of wisdom collect like little raindrops, without the hurry of flashy thunder. There is no rapture but plenty of aphorism. The poet’s style is staccato crisp, almost to the point of losing touch with metaphor. In the spaces between words, there is a place for stillness and attention, brief and temporary but present. Something happens in those spaces, when ‘the fort exhales and moonlight settles on stone’. These spaces make the collection a memorable one.  

(Amlanjyoti Goswami’s poems have been widely published. His book River Wedding was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi award. He has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and the Best of the Net award and he is a Montreal International Poetry Prize finalist.)