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Witerati | Of April, ambis and aftermath
In our post-Pandemic landscape in Baisakhi season, TS Eliot’s poetic ode to the month of April may find a mixed resonance
“April is the cruellest month ...”
This poetic ode to the month of April by bard TS Eliot may have been done to death, in the annals of the coronascape as much as cliche-ism.
Had Eliot penned this in ‘The Wasteland’ that is the present pandemic landscape than in the backdrop of the Spanish Flu, then may one venture to say, April may have been the new May.
A recent trip to the innards of Punjab to a picturesque pind called Dugri, subjected the mind’s eye to an Eliot-esque Wasteland. Where there had, a couple of weeks ago, unfurled a basanti odhni of sequinned sarson, there now stood a cloak of ashen paleness born of its crumbled corpses, that alternated and contrasted with a gleaming goldenness, radiating from ripening crop ahead of the north’s harvest festival Baisakhi. Gazing at this withered winter’s Wasteland, and mother nature’s narratives of life and death hand in hand, one views Eliot’s fabled verse in a new light. Through post-pandemic’s new lens, de-masked and de-fogged. As we emerge from the darkest winter’s Wasteland that was the pandemic, April, in this aftermath, may be rolling out narratives that make it not the cruelest, but the coolest month.
April is the coolest month, for it heralds to now mask-less nostrils the unfiltered and unbarricaded whiff of ‘boor’ bursting forth from boulevards bedecked with mango trees.
April is the coolest month, for the laps of Unlock’s Mother Earth now live out the lilting lyrics of the Gulzar Lahoria song, ‘Ambiyan Nu Boor Peya’, so synonymous with the advent of April. The breeding of ‘boor’ from the “dead land” imbues this month with an air and attitude of cool instead of cruel. Nothing “mixes memory and desire’ better than post-pandemic’s patios preening for the king of fruits.
The sweetness of its memory mixes with desire – that lusty longing for a luscious langda or safeda or dussehri.
That poetic melding of “memory and desire” bearing fruition in those luscious kernels birthing in the womb of a Mother Earth, unmindful of the ebb and flow of pandemic’s waves.
April is the coolest month, for it brings to pandemic’s parched palates un-rationed treats from kulfi-wallahs and the orange chuski-wallahs, and to the pockets of icecream-wallahs their lockdown-lost livelihoods.
April is the coolest month, for it also announces the advent of surahi wallahs and matka wallahs. It is the month when sweet flows the manna from these natural earthen refrigerators on throats not yet in the throes of May’s cruel parched-ness. It is the time when surahis are to April what “sikdis” are to December.
April is the coolest month, for it is the time when one can start swathing chiffons ‘n’ pearls without the latter being polished by beads of perspiration. It is the time when one can rummage and roll out the chic crepes without them yet sticking to the torsos like raincoats clinging to clammy, drenched bodices.
In a post-pandemic world, as one’s eyes gaze at the lush landscape rolling out the beaded carpet of a golden harvest, in the de-masked mind’s eye, April heralds a harvest of hope. Eliot’s narrative thus stands tweaked, for better or verse.
The curious case of April being not cruel, but the new cool.
chetnakeer@yahoo.com
