જૂનું પિયેર ઘર

Balwantray Thakore was modern Gujarati poetry's great disciplinarian — the man who imported the sonnet, demanded વિચારપ્રધાન કવિતા, thought-driven poetry, over easy song, and wrote in an idiosyncratic clipped orthography (ફરિવળિ, બદલિ, એવિ — preserved here) that was itself a kind of argument. His reputation is granite; this sonnet is the tenderness the granite protected. Its speaker is a married woman back in her પિયર, her parents' home, and the whole poem happens from a single seat: she settles onto the ખાટ, the old swing-cot, having wandered the upper rooms — and the house begins to play itself back. The metre doing this work is મંદાક્રાન્તા, "the slow ascender," classical poetry's cadence of longing since the Meghaduta, its long unhurried line perfectly gaited for memory climbing stair by stair.

The octave fills the empty house. Layer on layer of સ્મૃતિપડ — memory-films — unspool of their own accord: sweet mother; father a ભવ્ય મૂર્તી, a grand and gentle presence; the bent grandmother whose relishing stories delighted the children; empty places coming alive, old voices audible again, the little siblings and ખટમિઠાં — sweet-and-sour — playmates of childhood. And then the sonnet's most delicate turn: those companions, met now જ્યાં ત્યાં, here and there in grown life, have changed with age and seem to hide from her — સંતાય જાણે પરીઓ — like fairies who cannot be caught in daylight. The sestet gathers all these faces into one: across every remembered image spreads a single strange, many-formed presence, small and large at once, settled in her chest from her wedding day to this one — so deeply that even her girlhood seems, in retrospect, to have been spent easily in its child-disguise.

The final couplet names it. Having seen, from one swing-cot in one old house, her entire life — ઝિંદગી જોઈ સારી — she knows at last the અનહદ ગતિ, the boundless, unstruck motion, નાથ મારા, ત્હમારી: my Lord, yours. The sonnet turns out to have been a devotional poem wearing a domestic sari; the presence hiding in every memory was God moving through a life disguised as its ordinary loves. It makes an exact pair with Thakore's other poem in this archive, ભણકારા — there the infinite arrives as sound-echoes on a riverbank at dusk; here it is discovered sitting quietly in the childhood home, where it had been all along.