K.Srilata

Srilata is a poet, fiction writer, translator. She teaches Creative writing and Literatures in Translation at IIT Madras.   Winner of the first prize in the All India Poetry competition 1998 organised by the British Council and the Poetry Society, India for her poem “In Santa Cruz, Diagnosed Homesick” the Gouri Majumdar poetry prize instituted by The Brown Critique in the year 2000 and the Unisun British Council poetry award 2007, her poems, stories and feature articles have appeared in Penguin India’s First Proofs, Fulcrum, The Little Magazine, Kavya Bharati, The Indian Express, The Hindu, Poetry Chain, New Quest, Poet and in anthologies of poetry such as 99 words (2006) and the Writer’s Workshop anthologies.   

Srilata’s anthology of poetry titled Seablue Child was published by the Brown Critique, Kolkata in the year 2000. In 2006, she was short-listed for the Little Magazine new writing award for her story Sarasu. Prakriti Foundation, Chennai and the British Council have organised readings of her poetry and fiction.  Srilata was also supported by a Charles Wallace India Trust travel grant (in 1999) to participate in a Creative Writing course conducted by the Arvon Foundation, U.K.

Srilata has a Ph.D in English from the Central University, Hyderabad.  She was Fulbright Pre-doctoral Fellow in English Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz between September 1995 and June 1996.  She has also been involved in various academic and research projects.  Her book Short Fiction from South India co-edited with Subashree Krishnaswamy was published by OUP in 2007.  In 2003, Kali for Women published her translation of women’s writing from the Self-Respect movement The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History. Currently, she is working on an anthology of Tamil poetry in translation for Penguin India and also on a novel. 

I. Poems from Seablue Child . Kolkata: Brown Critique, 2002

In Santa Cruz, Diagnosed Home-sick

At the gift shop by the wharf
I bought an indigo octopus
all arms…
I, a new comer to this
out-of –the-way white-hippie town
settle into the sea.
My two-month hostility melts
even as I see what divides me from home
more clearly than I did from my airless plane.

The sea know ways of connecting too,
of fluidly hugging,
in long-armed benevolence,
the puzzle-edges of vast continents.

(First Prize, All India Poetry competition, British Council, 1997)

The House
Many poems nestle inside houses.
Like this woman with a sad, crumbling face
her soft saree mocking her every move
coming apart at leisure.
I think of how someone must have loved her
as a baby
caressed her baby toes, skin, hair.
They say:
She comes from a rich home
but married the wrong man

1. a dried up stick who cannot understand

the poem lingering on her face.
They say:
Hurt has made her barren
though actually she loves children.
They say:
She is a healer.
She even healed her mother-in-law’s cancer.
They say:
She sleeps little.
Some nights she wanders through the run-down garden
looking for a peace that the day does not bring her.
They say:
She speaks to no one.
In fact, she stopped speaking years ago.
           
Sometimes the poem sitting in that crumbling old house
urges me to knock
at the door
and touch her face.
Each day every day
I pass the house.
I just pass by.

Seablue Child

As a child I liked
the blue of the sea.
Sea-blue frocks
Sea-blue happy
Sea-blue quiet
and languid sea-shells.
Seablue
Hyphenated
visually one.

I even asked
a father who never cared
for a sea-blue frock
flowing with frills

like the sea.

Kamalamma

Kamalamma’s lips

betel-chewing red
some local lipstick
and a Friday night ritual.
A loan of endless forgetfulness
and scattered jasmine
breathing in partnership
scanty air from windows overlooking
other despairs.

Five sons (eight children) later
she is a cook at the union office.
Busy men fight causes.
Radicals abuse governments.
Kamalamma posts a thousand letters
licks as many stamps
mentions her husband’s muscular prowess
just in case
and serves out the tea.

Ten years.
The union is dead.
What has grown is Kamalamma’s drumstick tree
proving useful in a corner of the garden.
                   (Gayatri Mazumdar Poetry Prize, 2000)

 Recent Poems

Waikiki Aquarium, Honolulu

In this land
even the Moonjelly fish
appear to dance the hula
their skirts swaying
like Pi’ilani’s
descending through glass and water
with the grace of parachutes.

Hermit crabs
are more cautious.
Like thousands in this land
whose anger burns cold
as they stick flaming torches
along Waikiki
before graceless tourists
a minute before sundown
they don’t let on.

They don’t let on
that it is not really about pretty fish
and dancing the hula
in grass skirts
from Gilbert Islands.

They don’t let on
that it is about the rape
of the land.

                                                            Dressed for Transit

When mother came
to New York city
she wore unfashionably cut
salwar kurtas
mostly in beige
so as to blend in,
 her body
a puzzle that was missing a piece
 the saree
she had left miles behind:
that peacock blue
Kanjeevaram,
 that nondescript nylon in which she had raised
and survived me,
the stiff chikan
that had once held her up at work.

When mother came to
New York city
an Indian friend
who swore by black
and leather
remarked in a kind of stage whisper,
“This is New York, you know –
not Madras.
Does she even realise?”
                                                --- contd..

Ten years later,
transiting through L.A airport
I find mother
all over again
in the uncles and aunties
who shuffle past the Air India counter
in their uneasily worn, unisex Bata sneakers,
suddenly brown in a white space,
louder than ever in their linguistic unease
as they look for quarters and payphones,
and catch the edge of her saree
sticking out
like a malnourished fox’s tail
from underneath
some other woman’s sweater
meant really for Madras’ gentle Decembers,
useful, nevertheless,
in all the pointlessless
of transit. 

Family Tree

A tree is a resilient thing.
Cut a branch and the sap flows
smoothly out.

Other branches continue
            as ever.
Soon, the healing happens.
Leaves grow back..
Of deep-down hurt there is no trace.

Consider, on the other hand, a family
that has grown apart
branch by branch.
For years, they deliberately ignore each other’s weddings
until
some two generations down
the sap inside begins to fester and hurt.

Our House

It was warm colours, I remember, for the hall –
red and sunset orange.
Splashes of extravagant pink in the bath.
A dash of canary yellow here and there.
At night, a peaceful green and blue bedspread
that hugged us...
I forgot to mention the fresh flowers
which, you claimed, mimicked the open,
the boisterous friends every evening,
and our pale-faced refrigerator
that stood looking
Nonplussed but new (like everything else).

The house is different now -
Plastic toys grin obscenely at us,
and a baby cycle appears everywhere,
very much in the way.
Cupboards spew out clothes, books, toys,
            stuff
as the walls close in
on what is really an absurdly small house.