Thoughts that September Afternoon & Does That Tale Resonate

Abstract

The poems deal with the intricate connections between memory, the place, the time and cultural change as the speaker returns to a rural landscape which has strong ties to childhood and collective memory. The first poem considers the familiar village, for which the fields are now replaced by markets and rice mills, the mud houses by brick buildings, the daily routines by new life ways and its traditions by its new inhabitants—old acquaintances and family members who are no longer living but now transformed. Underlying all those changes is, however, an abiding feeling for a landscape and the people, rituals, stories and pleasures of it that are remembered. The second poem, Does That Tale Resonate, continues the meditation for the question of whether the oral traditions, folk tales, fairs, performances, and communal practices of the past remain or not. The memory of Alha, folk stories, village fairs, Bhagats, Nirguniyas, Sufis, seasonal foods and traditional games result in the image of an enriching rural culture getting pushed aside by screens, commercialization and changing social norms. The poems as a collection offer, in addition to a poignant sense of the past, a look at the presence and absence of culture. They explore the relationship of modernity and physical spaces while also examining how modernity affects the collective memory, leaving the individual retro- or transnational in the experience of the returned “other”. Overall, the poems indicate that sites appear somewhat familiar in space, but over time people, practices, relationships, and stories that have significance to a site become undetectable.