Description
Geetha Ravichandran’s The Spell of the Rain Tree is a gentle meditation on the passage of time as it continually re-calibrates our lives, our memories, our relationship with our surroundings. These poems elude the calendar’s relentless momentum and resist the pervasive forms of social media through which we filter our experience today. Ravichandran evokes the flute-seller’s melody, never to be reduced to an Instagram post; she traverses the urban labyrinth of Mylapore, which will never submit to Google Maps. She retrieves intimate heirlooms, visceral talismans: the koels’ songs that have melted into her grandmother’s mango pickles, the courage to cross a precarious rope-bridge, the consolations of a home that is a magic lantern composed from changing light, shifting shadow. These poems remind us to cherish the exquisite, replenishing details that arm our imagination against the numbing blandishments of speed and scale. The Spell of the Rain Tree is a tender education in attentiveness; in looking for the magical, redeeming intervals in time’s flux; in chronicling the ephemeral as the best guarantee of eternity: “The wave has tucked itself/ into the folds of the ocean.” — Ranjit Hoskote
Author’s Note
A rainbow fell from the sky… and became a rain tree.
So, I imagine.
Just outside the house where we once lived, there was a huge tree with a spreading canopy. Most times it looked so ordinary, as if it were a mere prop in the background.
It was so ordinary that its leaves went to sleep in the evening. It was the thoongu moonji maram, the sleepy-headed tree, as we say tartly in Tamil. But come summer, the pink feathery flowers spiked into view. And very soon the monkey-pods appeared, rattling in the wind.
I have a special fondness for this tree. While coaxing and cajoling my sons, Vasu and Adi, to get ready for school, I would point out to them that even the tree had shaken off its sleep. Most days two pesky parakeets, squawking up a riot would come to my aid.
If only we would listen to the stories that trees could tell. Or stay quiet to be transfixed by their austere beauty, when they are bereft of foliage. I would like to think that when leaves fall, there is an underlying epiphany — flowing like music, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
GEETHA RAVICHANDRAN is a bureaucrat originally from Chennai. While she has been writing consistently for several years, she has only published intermittently. The pandemic revived her interest in poetry. This is her second collection of poems. Her first, Arjavam, was also published by Red River.
Reviews
Trisha Mukherjee in The New Indian Express
Ravichandran’s subjects grab attention because they are innocuous enough to go unnoticed. When was the last time you paid attention to Windows and the world that becomes accessible as you swing them open? The poet redirects your attention: “Birds drape themselves/ on cable TV antenna… in the posture of those/ who have no need to justify/ what they do with their time.” The languor in the rhythm of the free verse helps the words come alive, rendering a meditative effect on the reader.
Shabnam Mirchandani in Usawa Literary Review
For some, the draw of reading poetry lies in its existential possibilities and also in the promise of an unexamined self emerging raw and un-redacted through another’s words. A quiver of relational coherence is often experienced when a finely wrought poem rises like air from the page and envelopes a reader in its rhythms. Geetha’s poems offer this vicarious sense of homecoming, and more. A “tousled cloud” and “coins of light” sprinkle ruminations, letting nature’s voice waft in subtle wisps, creating an ontology of consolation through acts of retrieval and reclamation. This unfolds in a powerfully luminescent quietude despite violent hijacking by projectiles of stress, distraction, and pervasive ecocidal mania consuming a world which abuses the very biosphere that sustains it.
Sumana Sarkar in The Financial Express
Speaking about what inspired Geetha Ravichandran to start this anthology, her second collection of poems after Arjavam (2022), she said, “The book was born out of an amalgam of perceptions and experiences. It is a chronicle of the shades and nuances of ordinary things. Looking closely, listening deeply, to the sights and sounds around us — the book is a product of attentiveness. Also, very often we find a spark, a glimmer in the lives and struggles of people we meet, waiting to be transformed into a story.”
From the Book
Crone Power
The prized family heirloom,
a Ruby Red pendant
shaped like a dancing doll
turned out to be fake.
What seemed solid gold
was filled with lac
and the gems mere glass.
Now, the good luck
attributed to this carefully
handed down possession
is claimed by
an indomitable grandmother…
blessings
conferred by stars
suitably propitiated by her.
Long Years
A bear hug
dissolves
past
betrayals.
Now we chatter
to the waltz
of walking sticks,
speaking without listening.
But we still remember
how we stood
under the peepul tree
counting stars.
A Pen Sketch
I sketch a narrative
in sharp, clean lines
and then without design
I find myself right there in it —
frizzy hair, toothy smile and all —
I am the habitual photobomb.
I hear a whisper,
erase histories, carve the story hollow —
like a fishing boat,
let the fleeting form steered by the wind
ride the waves
and cast the net wide.
Siesta
The sun streams in
through the gap
the curtain couldn’t close
and inverts on the polished floor
the shadow of a tousled cloud
falling out of a blue sky
to converge on the steel cupboard
and scatter coins of light on the old wooden cot,
as I flop down for my afternoon siesta.
The static of unfinished chores
is submerged in this flood of delight.
Sepia
It was sheer drudgery
that fleshed dreams
and trimmed edges
to fashion the victory run.
All that unfelt joy
has been pixelated.
A sheaf of old photos,
stained and faded,
bring back images of chirping squirrels
and forgotten sparrows
that witnessed
the arduous pre-dawn practice.
Finale
The woman reaches her dingy hut
and drinks long from the earthen pot,
water spilling on to her crumpled sari.
She curls, groaning under the stars,
as pain kneads her muscles, and a sneaky breeze
blowing past the gutter, shakes out her breath.
In the still deepness of the night
from the windows of the high rise,
she appears wrapped in fitful sleep.
The street is flaccid.
Bridge
From the culvert, the view of the hill
shows the two peaks as one,
the smaller hiding the taller,
celebrated crest.
There, the walkers sit succumbing to indolence
and can see nothing but an intangible pull
hurtling differences, flattening mud and clay
like a sea would pat down its waves.
It’s a seamless beauty
that flows down the slopes —
streams watering the roots of the rugged grass
and thorn bushes that bind the hill.
Return
Back to the place that was once home,
memories of unkept promises fester.
It’s like being lost on a goat track ringed by thorn bushes.
A crackling, awkward silence swallows words,
and a tasteless meal is gulped down with water.
Indulgent laughter chimes in the distance —
cracked eggshells of memories
that once nurtured a promise of life.
The wave has tucked itself
into the folds of the ocean.
Lotus Love
It makes music, the petals
as they open in tandem
with the warmth of the slanting rays
of the sun, which has brushed
the sandy bank with a tint of light.
You told me that
there’s a bud lotus in my heart.
It dances on its stalk
as your gentle words
float in through the air,
to reach eyes lined with sleep.
The resonant chant
rises to a crescendo
and falls to a sharp stillness
in awe of the unstruck sound.
