Living Room: Poems

By Manohar Shetty

Ever since he published his first book of poems, A Guarded Space (1981), the trajectory of Manohar Shetty's poetry has gradually shifted from the intensely personal to embrace and encapsulate a wider and increasingly fractious world. Using dovetailing internal rhythms and his trademark offbeat metaphors, Shetty interweaves a hard-won lightness of touch with sardonic humour, a reinvention of Indian English and cutting irony to expose the scars of an iniquitous society, emerging, in the process, as a quiet but distinctive and resilient voice in contemporary English verse in India.This is a book to be savoured and treasured.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9789351369776

Manohar Shetty

Manohar Shetty has published six books of poems, including Domestic Creatures. His new book forthcoming from HarperCollins is Living Room. Several anthologies feature in his work, including The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets.

Book preview

Sunworshippers, Anjuna

Their eyes are invisible

Behind their sunglasses.

Their walrus breasts

Resting apart like

Gunny sacks wear

A hint of whiskers.

At high noon they’re back

In the palmfrond shack.

They nurse a gin and tonic

Or a tepid beer as the bored

Waiters swat flies from

The checked tablecloth.

They lumber off for a last dip

Before sunset, turn on their

Bellies for an even tan.

Their spreadeagled legs are

Pink as hunks of ham

Hanging from hooks.

In their rooms they shower

Off the sand and gel.

They share a candlelit supper.

They fly back home with a light

Shade of butterfly wings

Stamped on their buttocks.

Praying Mantis

Not quite

Wellrounded,

The praying mantis is

All angles as she

Gangles in shyly

To join in

The party. Her

Filament-thin legs

Are born

Stilts with built-in

Forks to pin down

Her supper, her face

A swaying

Equilateral

Triangle like an

Alien’s, her

Panoramic

Quizzical eye

Rolling round for

A suitable partner.

Finding no one

Eligible, she takes

Off on sudden

Wings to land deftly

On a strand of dewy green

Grass where she takes

Cover, waits

Hungrily again

For that delectably

Juicy

Lover.

Survivor

(for Riya)

My daughter brings a crocodile

Home, its snout bound tight

With rope, its buckteeth clenched.

Untangled from a fisherman’s net,

It lies still on our strip of lawn,

Its tail serrated as a saw, its hide

Like chainmail. We stare

Back at its staring eye

From our safe balconies

As my daughter and her team

Haul it like a palanquin

Into a purring pick-up. Accustomed

Only to lost kittens and pups,

We watch in suburban awe as they

Set off in a swirl of dust

For that remote river, green

With slime, but home

To their captive and its kind,

Their ridged heads floating like islets;

Or sunning themselves on the banks

Where birds peck clean their

Yawning cavities, busy as dentists,

And where they’re out of reach

From the stench of the tannery

And those spotlit arcades

Of shoes, belts, wallets,

And other accessories.

National Bird

They’re pretty, they say, their feathers

Iridescent as the borders

Of a Kanjeevaram saree

And fit to adorn the head

Of a crown prince, the costume

Of a medieval heroine or shaped

Into fans hawked by the dozen

At every village fair and market