Title: Symphonies of Life
Author: Meenakshi Mohan
Publisher: Penprints-India
Year of Publication: 2024
Heart touching memorialization of family and daily universal living
While reading Meenakshi Mohan’s debut poetry collection, Symphonies of Life, I was reminded of the movie Sound of Music with its lilting hills, flowing, welcoming music, and its familial joys and challenges. Looking back, that movie, more than any other, established for me a yardstick of how families stick together despite all odds. There are numerous poems throughout this heartwarming collection with the same thematic thrust, with verses on or about her mom, husband, daughter, son, grandparents, granddaughter, and sister. It is a memoir in poetry with a few poems on other themes such as race, aging, Gandhi, and mythological characters, among others, sprinkled here and there like petals from fragrant flowers. And here in lies the beauty of such a poetry collection, its inherent timelessness and universality because of the relevance of families for almost every human, even our planet’s non-human inhabitants. After all, loving, longing, losing, pain, joy, agony, and survival are natural instincts for any being. I believe Mohan employs the memorialization of her family as a technique to allude to behaviors, actions, and patterns of human relationships.
Mohan begins her book with a reproduction of her artist-writer mother’s Hindi poem, “A Tribute to My Mother” (p. 21). On the opposite side of the page, Mohan has translated that poem into English. This soft, evocative poem sets the stage for positing inter-generational connections that find a strand throughout the book. Readers may receive glimpses into the desire, satisfaction, guilt, and duty of her various close relationships. “I may not even return one-hundredth of what you gave me/Yes, if you come again/then I will instantiate what I owe to you to my heart’s consent.” (A Tribute to My Mother,” p. 21). On the very next page, Mohan has her own poem to her mother, “I Am Always With You, My Child” (p. 22), and she thanks her mother for her recovery from a fall down the stairs and then goes on to become nostalgic of bygone days. “Was it your prayers that saved me? How can I find that string that connected us?”
In the next poem, on page 24, Mohan speaks about her parents and the promises she made to her mother that she would take care of her father: “Yes, Ma, I took care of Baba till his last breath.” And the very next line is: “I looked at my two-year-old daughter…I smiled through my tears—she is my Dua.” This poem achieves two things with alacrity. One, it connects a thread between generations, and two, the title in Hindi stamps and etches a linguistic celebration. Dua in Hindi means prayer. Several other poems, either in the totality of their title or some words therein, are a nod to Mohan’s mother tongue, Hindi. So, we have “Akashdeep” (p. 25), “Dreams of a Rickshawala” (p. 34), My Dadi’s Rasoi” (p. 55), “Gilhari” (59), “Maya” (p. 69), and “Raktabeej” (p. 146) to name a few.
Bonding with one’s birth country and the people left behind is an intrinsic part of diaspora literature, which one finds in abundance in Mohan’s collection. V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Shashi Tharoor, among others, are diaspora writers who express themselves as such. Since most of the poems in this collection are about Mohan’s family, the Hindi utilization seems appropriate and not out of place. In fact, it provides cultural excitement and anticipation as to the meanings therein.
Besides family members being subjects in her endearing poems, Mohan also has poems on home and belonging—again, a diasporic writer’s mojo, such as the poem “An Old House on the Shores of the Ganga” (p. 41), which personifies the house itself as a physical entity providing a warm, fuzzy feeling. “I saw many come and go…I cried when the old grandparents departed this world/ I sobbed when you moved away/My walls are filled with memories—echoes of voices and rings of laughter/Come and listen to my stories.” (p, 41) Since poetry is one of the purest expressive creative forms, it’s possible there is an intentional intent by the author in employing the relationships in her life and the locations where she lives as a subconscious ploy to convey universal messages of obligation, respect, friendship, failure, aspiration, and so forth.
Another common strand in Mohan’s poetry is the attention directed towards a multitude of gendered issues, such as early marriages, arranged marriages, and abusive marriages. Pressures of patriarchal and intergenerational expectations are also woven into the poems. In the poem “The Saga of an Arranged Marriage” (p. 38), Mohan writes, “Marriage was made to collect the dowry money/and to find an enslaved person for his comfort and pleasure/ In return, she was a victim of his rage on her tender body.” Illusion and disillusionment are surely hinted at in Mohan’s poems. Therefore, Symphonies of Life is a sociological and cultural treatise in the form of poetry.
Familial emotions are so vivid, the authenticity so clear, that Meenakshi Mohan appears to advocate Buddhist and Confucius teachings of rearing good children, being dedicated parents, and caring spouses. Primary relationships of parent-child-parent, husband-wife, siblings, and grandparent-child-grandchild are presented with great care, with precision in words and the meanings that could be derived from these.
The divorce of her sister is vividly captured in the poem “Ah! What Freedom!” (pp. 34-35), which also speaks to the general feeling of shame, fear, and guilt. “How could she shame her parents with the taboo of divorce?/Would they be able to bear the shock in their old age?” The notion that everyone in a given family has to be good is a very noble idea if, indeed, the world has to better itself. It’s similar to the “theory of innate goodness” in humans as propagated by the Chinese philosopher, Mencius, whose philosophy was a greater amplification of Confucius’s theology that the heart is where goodness originates. This seems amply true for Meenakshi Mohan’s poetry, as each one in the poems seems to have come from deep experiential situations, from the depths of her heart.
In summation, Symphonies of Life is the journey of a young woman across countries and cities, in the process of maturing and aging. It’s a journey of hopes and dreams. It’s the journey of human life through time, matter, and space. It is a spiritual journey, as depicted in the beautiful lives that Mohan and her family lived, in faith and positivity. It’s spatiality in the places and spaces that occupy Mohan’s her thoughts and dreams, her real life, and those of others who came across her path. Be it her parents, husband, sister, children, grandchildren, and strangers as well (“A Taxi Driver in Manhattan, New York,” p. 31). This collection is truly an ode to family.
A bit about the construction of the pages and the jacket design. There are quite a few quotations by Mohan’s favorite authors and painters as prefixes to the poems. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rabindranath Tagore, Amir Khusro, R.K. Narayan, Vincent Van Gogh, Emma Reed, Kody Kiplinger, Frank Herbe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Rumi. On some of the pages, in a vertical writing mode on one side of the page, there are some notes explaining the context of a particular poem. These creative elements provide a window into the mind of a consummate writer and painter. These are provided in italics and almost look like calligraphy and appear as a visual treat, giving us a framework reference to the poems.
The jacket by Hiran Roy is poignant in its colors and images. The pinks and oranges in the center kind of look like a storm, a tornado in the brewing or having gone by. The green and blue background merges with the hills on which a woman with a flying robe is seen standing and watching the horizon, which is very telling. The image has no face. It could be the author or anyone who can find themselves in Mohan’s poems. In unison, the storm and the quiet walk with the woman seemingly alone on her journey. This could signify that even if one has lived full lives in different relationships, at the core of it all, humans came alone and go alone, or could be left alone in this world. This collection is a must-read if one wishes to give due respect to the cosmos of living, loving, thriving, rejoicing, suffering, enduring, and finally passing on to a new plane of existence.
