The importance of being unimportant

Lekshmy was poetry editor for the website of the British Council for South Asian Women Writers, and her volume of poetry, Dusk Diary, was published in 2010. In 2016 HarperCollins published Attukal Amma: The Goddess of Millions, a richly illustrated book on a famous temple in her hometown. Here, she talks about the importance of unimportance, lost and found vision, and what faith might mean to an oak tree.

When I first met you we were neighbours in Kalakshetra Colony, and our connection was poetry. What role does poetry play in your life now?

I truly never asked myself this question. It is almost 13 years now, since our first meeting. I led a rather ordinary life, taking care of home, undergoing infertility treatment, writing irregularly. Life didn’t change much for me except that I have 12-year-old twin children now. Central Sahitya Akademi published my debut collection of poems in 2010, and I have not written poems after that.

I wish I had written more poems, but going through improbabilities of all sorts has been a major feature of my past. I wrote about all that until the birth of my twins, but motherhood put me in another kind of uncertainty, by not giving me the space in which my mind can readily move out wherever it wants to. My everyday life controls me more than I could control it.

I long to write those unwritten poems, and feel all the more distressed knowing tomorrow the kids have the class test in Civics or Hindi, the subjects I hated most as a student, and I have to be with them, teaching exactly those subjects. At the end of the day, I would have no power left in me to write down the elated feeling that filled me in the morning. I worked with a publishing house for eight years. A large part of my youthful life was devoted to domestic work and promoting other people’s works. Poetry draws on special energies and perceptions and these can be muted by the demands of an ordinary life. I hear my songs, but I alone hear them now.

You once told me: 'I never fell in love with anyone because I could not see anyone clearly'. Can you talk about this?

It would be wrong to say I never fell in love. Maybe not in the conventional way. I was short-sighted and never knew it till I was in my teens. I was an over-protected child. The entire world looked blurred to me, and I never could imagine that other people of my age saw the world differently and clearly. I couldn’t see notes on the blackboard or recognise even very familiar people from a distance. As a child, I was constantly strained about this — I could see what was close very well, but I hated what came from afar and did not want to pay any attention to it. My father took me to an ophthalmologist when I was 13 and I was given spectacles I was shy to use. Short-sightedness forced me to look closer to myself and keep away from everything I could not really see. If you ask me about a teen crush or about a boy I was in love with, I may not have an answer. I do not remember anyone’s face. However, I remember certain voices, and having never received the romantic or admiring glances of someone I liked or admired, or not knowing I am good-looking for a very long period in my life, is a very unromantic, unpoetic way of growing up. It is a loss.

After I got married, Rajeev purchased me contact lenses, and I still remember the first time I used them at an optical shop in Mount Road, tears clouding my eyes. I had a new world before me. The impact this had on me was enduring, and if I alter Neruda’s lines a bit, I loved love as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

How did this lack of vision lead you into vision, and into the writing of this book?

I have written in the preface of my book that I grew up in a home where gods are a living presence. We merely believed, and Prayer — along with English, Tamil and Malayalam — was another language I learned as a child. This was in the late 1970s and early ‘80s and we had only books or gods to turn to once it was dusk.

Things changed when I was 12 as my father fell critically ill. I started praying in a child’s way to prevent his imminent death, and began learning Sanskrit slokas to propitiate Lord Shiva, the life-redeemer, without knowing the meaning, from a prayer book my paternal uncle gifted me. I was drawn to esoteric wisdom in my later years. Turning to myself for answers was my nature, and seeking a power beyond me was always like listening to the right song that strikes the right note, incessantly. Later I found out the big book was nothing but hymns from the Vedas.

 

Āttukāl Amma: The Goddess of Millions is the pinnacle of my life, faith, earnings, fate, optimism, fears and audacity. Kerala has a unique and mysterious Bhadrakali cult and I believe Goddess Kali is the most primordial superpower of our land. The virgin-widow 11-year-old girl has the wildness and power of a Goddess but she also has the life and mind of a human. Kali is drastically different from the Brahminical, Sanskritised concepts of a Goddess. She amused me, and kept me in that fervent state for nearly five years.

The book took years to finish since the topic required a colossal amount of research, learning, unlearning and endurance. I wrote it to understand what exactly I know of a Goddess I liked and beyond. Artist Madanan, Hari Thirumala and Manoj Vasudevan Nair (the latter two are photographers) worked with me as a team, to create this book. I learned Temple Tantra and meditated on everything, walked as if in a trance, worrying about nothing and living in Her, writing what I wanted. This also gave me steadfast concentration — a blissful state, probably the rarest that one is capable of experiencing. I heard only the sounds I desired to hear, met only those I wanted to meet.

The book was accepted by VK Karthika, then Chief Editor of HarperCollins Publishers. I believe it was the first book she ever commissioned merely by looking at the ecstasy in its author’s eyes. The next sleepless eleven months, I worked hard to honour her trust in me. The book is in their bestseller list now.

How would you explain faith to a non-believer? What is its essence? For example, if you had to explain faith to an oak tree?

This is so debatable, Tishani. All I can say is, faith is a state of mind — a state your mind reaches when all kinds of rational approaches fail in anything you do. Nonbelievers see faith as an unreasonable religious belief in God without any evidence. My understanding of faith is more nuanced. It doesn’t prove anything. Faith is inherent in living beings right from birth. A baby has an instinctual faith in the mother. Children have the subliminal faith that the parents will provide for them. We base our lives on the faith that we will be alive the next moment or hour. Even rationalists have faith in rationality as a governing principle of life. An oak tree has the unconscious biological faith that its roots will get water and leaves will receive sunlight to sustain it. I hope the oak tree will understand if I tell it what faith is, through its own features. Ultimately, everything boils down to faith in some form.

The word you use to describe yourself is ‘unimportant.’ We live in a time where many people are convinced of their importance and their opinions. What do you think is the importance of unimportance?

This predicament stemmed from the observations I made about life, mainly after I became a mother. What shape is the sky? How do I resemble you, amma? I couldn’t answer (m)any of those questions my children asked. An unanswerable, simple question about life becomes a barrier that cannot be transgressed. Every breath is the limit of human possibilities, which sets boundaries. Everything that lived before me came and went, following some eternal laws. I stand mesmerised, and slowly explore. I haven’t even understood the flutter of eyelids, or life vanishing within and around. I close my eyes and sense an imperceptible ocean of excitement. I bow before it, feeling totally unimportant.

An inflated sense of self-importance is the most important (pun intended) game people play nowadays. The problem with this game is that gradually the game starts playing you, and your mind will be cluttered, and you’ll be writing and talking for approval, which will affect the quality of your craft. Remaining unimportant or restrained has given me infinite space to work with. In that unimportant state you can keep yourself aside and freely write.