Reflections On A Hindu Undivided Family

This is my explication of the poem written by A. K. Ramanujan-"Small-scale Reflections on a Great House."

As the very title of the poem suggests, "Small-scale Reflections on a Great House", is a free verse, wherein the images are chaotic and loosely packed to convey the true sense of it.

The very title gives the idea that the poet has reflected on or about, or reproduced whatever he has noticed and experienced about "three generations living under one roof."

The poet brings in the imagery of things which seem to never vanish in the verses. Things that come in everyday to lose themselves among other things lost long ago among other things lost long ago ad infinitum.

Lame wandering cows came out from nowhere have been known to be tethered (fastened) and their necks were also tied up with bells(remember Belfast). Given a name, encouraged to get pregnant in the broad daylight of the street. Hey! Here the poet has told the daylight is of the street because whatever heat and light was being emitted by the sun, was being absorbed and reflected within the broadness of the street.

The girls were seen hiding behind windows, through their holes, sick of and fearing participation or collaboration in the activity.

Unread library books usually mature in two weeks and begin to lay eggs in the ledgers for fines, as silverfish in the old man's office room breed dynasties, among long legal words, in 'succulence' of the Victorian parchment.

Neighbours' dishes brought up with the greasy and hence perishing sweets they made all night day before yesterday for the wedding anniversary of a god, never leave the house they enter, like the servants, the phonographs, the epilepsies in the blood, which bring in periodical bouts of fits, the sons-in-law who quite forget their mothers, but stay to check accounts or teach arithmetic to nieces,

or the women who come as wives from houses open on one side to rising suns, on another to the setting, accustomed to wait and to yield to monsoons, then present only in the mountains' calendar, beating through the hanging banana leaves.

And also anything that goes out will come back, processed and often with long bills attached, like the hooped bales of cotton shipped off to invisible Manchesters and brought back milled and folded for a price, cloth to clad the loins of the daytimes' middle-class, and muslin for our richer nights.

Letters mailed have a way of finding their way back, experimenting with directions and stumbling upon wrong addresses, very evident from red ink-marks on them

earned in Tiruvalla and Sialkot(Perhaps 'cause the network of roads and lanes in these places is tumultous.) And ideas behave like rumours, once casually mentioned somewhere they come back to the door as prodigies of prodigal fathers with eyes that vaguely look like their own, to carry forward all those things we call 'transferrable' from the parents to their progenies, and, also, they are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself;

like what Uncle said the other day: that every Plotinus we read is what some Alexander looted between the malarial rivers-as the cumulative, cascading effect which sneaks into the Sales tax and Value-Added Tax(VAT) system. A beggar once came with a violin to croak out a prostitute song, like the fictional frog and the act of the fictional character 'Mozart'(a magician), that their voiceless cook sang all the time in the backyard.

Nothing stays out: daughters get married to short-lived idiots; return of absconded sons in yet another form-that of grandchildren who recite Sanskrit for the approval and recognition of old men, or bring betelnuts for visiting uncles who engage them with anecdotes of unseen fathers, or to bring Ganges water in a copper pot for the dying ancestors' last rattle in the throat...like, that when things kept on a table are rattled by an earthquake, or the rasping of a lamb-Everything happens for good-tit for tat.

And though many times from everywhere, recently only twice: once in nineteen-forty-three from as far as the Sahara, luckily only half-gnawed by desert foxes, and lately from somewhere in the north, a nephew with stripes on his shoulder was called an incident on the border and was brought back in plane, train, military truck, even before the telegrams reached, when the clock struck to say-"A perfectly good chatty daybreak!"

Author's Note

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