Art in Restraint

For humans, freedom has been the focal point of existence. We associate happiness, growth, worthiness of life, to the point of being able to breathe right, with freedom. However, time and again, we are restrained and by either society or our own emotions. Let's dive into the feeling momentarily once more with some great poets and our find Hansika Goel. But first, an eye treat by Personified Headache (art name).

'The eyes that look at me' by Personified Headache. The artwork is inspired by an excerpt from Omprakash Valmiki's autobiographical text 'Joothan' which describes the experiences of an oppressed individual through their eyes.

Pandemic

By Avinab Datta-Areng

If my breath is now afraid of itself,

blueing at its own thought and arrival,

as a bruise gathers among bruises

in a faraway ground, aphids bustling

above them, picking at the sweet scabs.

If I am now foreign to myself,

removed, dispersed into the sleep

of others, rousing them momentarily

into a dull fear like a fine web settling

over their skin, their eyes; then they find

and trust the milk in their minds to lull

them back. If your sleep is the only sleep

that recognizes me, resists me, because

you too have become foreign, floating

where our nakedness is no longer

the kindred, watchful clouds trailing

our blood. If what you don’t recognize

in you is my breath afraid of itself,

as this growing apart mulches and now means

only to the ground; more and more we’re

asked to isolate our bodies, until what

might remain is what we never began with,

but was supposed to be, what was only

and always asked of us. If that formlessness

is what I’m asking you to see in me,

as your silence spreads and invades

through me. If the only way to you now

is by giving in to this disease, let this silence

grow where I’m not. If I let your silence lie over me.

Inside

By Deepankar Khiwani

Everything’s contained, in something else.

Our genes ferment in little cells, our habits sit dour and sulking in those genes

uncertainty totters within each assertion, and the acid vodka

is lucid in my glass; which sits by me in this failing restaurant.

O and we Empty Out and we Transfer. Vodka trickles into me, and

my wry disdain of everything permeates the bar like the gas left on

by a fin-de-siècle suicide. Inside the vacuous barman’s iris I see flecks of green

and exasperation, there’s a question in his head as he sees me staring at his chest;

and so soon I’m trickling out, into the street again, jacketless,

Last January and I fight for space in sobriety,

contending, we stumble through the street, then lingering like smoke in the lift,

to then distil within the rented despair of this motel room,

its curtains lurid red and green. Standing at the basin, I put on my wedding ring.

I see I’ve displaced the man who’s left

his false teeth on the counter, in a half-full glass;

he’s displaced me in a world of phantoms, left his smile staring at me,

looking for home. Oh everything’s contained, re-circulated, trapped,

transferred and abandoned and can’t be got rid of,

and an old raw laughter rasps out of me, like a cough,

and echoes within a wholly missing room.

Perspective

By Sudesh Mishra

Whether a jet unzips

Or zips up the sky

Is, as things go,

Six of one and half

A dozen of the other.

Not for you or me

Or the jet perhaps,

But to the sky

It’s one and the same.

SLAVES

By Hansika Goel

We are slaves, slaves of the society. Slaves of loneliness, drunk on love.

Fearing the new master, obeying the old one, the one we're used to,

the one keeping us in a loop.

We are slaves, slaves of the loop, drunk on something different, something new.

Maybe a change, fearing it.

Slaves of the fear. Conquering it, we visit the society's prison.

We are slaves, slaves of the society. Slaves of loneliness, drunk on love.

We are slaves, slaves of the loop drunk on something different, something new.

***

For the love of art,

Charuvi