Dear reader,
I want to write about protest poetry, protest memes and protest satire. And about the power of words, and about naming what should not be called.
All week at home we’ve been discussing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: The Story of Students Against the Ministry of Magic. Political appointees like Dolores Umbridge seize control. Threats of violence from Death Eaters. The similarities to real life seem uncanny.
It beeps on my phone. It is a poem from a hundred years ago. About cockroach. It was written by American Don Marquez, and its title is The Chicken and the Oriole.
Another Tune, Another Poem – A Sarcastic Conversation with a Cockroach by Indra Narayan Das. The cockroach, which inspired Kafka’s protest against isolation, humiliation and disappearance, is back at center stage once again.
There’s been so much going on, it seems like too much to take in, and I woke up this morning and my mind was fuzzy.
The youngest member of our book club is leaving. His company is sending him to New York next month, so he decides to marry his girlfriend of four years, and then he leaves while she applies for her visa. We met her for the first time last night, and I could see us through her: this group of opinionated older people who somehow occupied an undue portion of real estate in her significant other’s mind, and yet also a group who loved him, who shaped him, and who will miss him.
Anyway, they left, we made a few farewell speeches, and it was all sad, as if nothing lasts, which is of course true.
As we walked home through the rainy streets of Mumbai, another reader and I remembered all the people who joined the book club and then a few years, or many years later, left, moving to Hong Kong or London or Toronto or New York. We lost them one by one, but not completely. They remain part of the story we tell ourselves about this strange little community built around books.
On this cloudy Sunday morning, I sit at my desk with mixed emotions: a sense of triumph at the student protests and uneasiness about what comes next. Will things work out for the students? Or will everything simply return to how it was before?
I feel sad because nothing lasts, not the book clubs, not the ministries, not the momentum. However, there is one thing that endures, and I am grateful for it: words. Songs, epics, and poems endure and come back.
A man returns home after twenty years of wandering the world, and his story is told out loud, in poetry, in print, on screen. The cockroach is still complaining, a hundred years later, about a million phone screens.
And you, dear reader, what is the poem or line that has stuck in your mind longer than you expected?
(Sonia Dutta Chowdhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a personalized book service. For all questions on life and literature, email sonyasbookbox@gmail.com)
