Review of "Symphonies of Life" by Meenkashi Mohan

Symphonies of Life By Meenakshi Mohan

Published by Penprints India (2024)

Price: 400 INR

ISBN: 978-81-967932-5-8

Language: English, pp.154

Appropriately titled Symphonies of Life, Mohan’s book of poems blends various vivid colours of life for the reader. Like a rainbow appearing in the sky and gradually vanishing, the book leaves us with a sense of quiet fulfillment. According to Aristotle, “catharsis” is the emotional purification of a person witnessing a play. Similarly, Mohan’s poems purge readers’ emotions by making them feel everything in a single volume.

A poet and a painter, Meenakshi Mohan writes in both Hindi and English. She grew up in a small industrial town near Calcutta. For hours, she used to watch the meeting point of the Hooghly River and the Bay of Bengal, the ships in the harbour, and listen to the fishermen’s songs. The connection between the ebb and flow of the tide and the cycle of life consistently appears in her poems. The symbol of the river appears throughout the book:

“When your ashes were dispersed in the Ganges, you floated as a kamal flower in the streams.” (“Namesake”, 27)

“Alas! Life is short! On my sick bed, I thought of the young salmon,

migrating arduous streams and returning to their birthplace!” (“A Journey Home”, 29)

Mohan employs a personal tone in her poems. Her ideas range from personal loss, migration, and nostalgia to hope, freedom, and prosperity. She lost her husband Kshitij to cancer when he was at the pinnacle of his career. Dedicating the poem “Emancipation” to her husband, she writes:

“You were perhaps an illusion,

but for me, this convergence of you and me

stayed as absolute as the seven steps of the solemn oath

we took before the holy fire.” (32)

For many critics, what matters is the movement of a poem from the personal to the universal. But Mohan’s poems sometimes bring you to a standstill and blur this boundary. When you think she’s talking about the universal, she’s actually talking about the personal. When you think she’s referring to the personal, it is the other way around. Some of her poems like “A Taxi Driver in Manhattan, New York”, “Smog”, and “The Story of You and Me” bring the reader to a void, like a road suddenly disappearing from one’s sight.

Her talent for painting is also visible in her poems. Her poems take shape through rich vocabulary and clear diction. A painting lays itself bare in front of a viewer at first glance, but a poem, especially one laden with rich imagery takes its time to unfold. Her poems, have a life of their own—experiencing moments of intense natural scenes. This is reflected, for instance, in the following lines from “The Rage of the Sky”:

“…the blue sky was enveloped in smoky dark clouds.

The sun shied away, and the sky seethes with fiery flames.

Bloody streaks of red and purple bled

through the rough rankles of the shadows.

The wrinkled ways of the ocean

calmly tried to soothe its shore.”

As a poet, her individuality develops with the ways in which she experiences incidents and how she handles them. To say that Mohan is too personal in her poems would be too narrow a view. At times, she deals with an impersonal subject matter with as much sensitivity as she does with her own life. My favourite poem in this collection is “Dreams of a Rickshawala”:

“Yes, you still had dreams-

when you went home to your shack

to your little boy and girl reading

under a dim, dangling light from the ceiling” (37)

Mohan’s poems do not explain the meaning of life, do not instruct, but please and soothe the reader. She invokes particular emotions in her readers—the Shringar Rasa through her tender handling of loss and longing, and the Shanta Rasa through her development of spiritual calm and detachment in her reflections on mortality.

She takes us by the hand through a landscape of experiences—some personal, some unfamiliar—and leaves us to discover our own meaning of life. Nature, mythology, violence, poverty, memory, and identity are also some of the themes that she touches upon in the book. Meenakshi Mohan’s poetry emerges as a breath of fresh air, especially in contemporary times, when people are blinded by false ideals and hollow goals. Her verse reminds us of the quiet truths that sustain us as human beings.

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About the Reviewer

Kumar Sawan is a Ph.D. scholar in the Department of English and Modern European Languages at the University of Lucknow. His work has been published by the Vernon Press, Madras Courier, Borderless, Rhetorica: A Literary Journal of Arts, Contemporary Literary Review India, SPL Journal, Literary Horizon, Creative Saplings, and the Teesta Review.