Of Least Concern (Literary Activism Series)

A GARDEN AND ITS ABUNDANT TREASURES COME ALIVE IN THESE POEMS ABOUT NATURE AND MORTALITY.

In ‘Approaching 80’, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra writes that ‘At 20, meeting an 80- year-old, I’d wonder what it’s like to be 80. Now I know. It’s like being 20 again … ‘ This means Mehrotra recognises what must seem obvious to his readers, new and old: that there’s some truth to the Japanese belief that reaching 60 brings, for the artist, a second lease of creativity, the possibility, as was the case with Hokusai, of a fresh oeuvre. Mehrotra’s eye, today, is nothing if not fresh. In fact, many of these poems, written from day to day in his garden in Dehradun, have the clarity of someone who sees himself in many ways as a painter, but continues to use words, believing they’re the best means available – at least for him – to visual and sensory immediacy. Whether writing about a moment in that garden or about walks taken during the lockdown, Mehrotra has never been so direct and exact. It’s as if he’s just beginning. And yet, because (as he says in the same poem) approaching 80 also means knowing that ‘fathers have breakdowns, mothers dementia, family houses are sold’, he’s aware, in this, his ninth, collection, of the depredations and the great good fortune that the passing of time brings.