Eerie - Arun Kolatkar's Poem 'An Old Woman'

An old woman grabs

hold of your sleeve

and tags along.

She wants a fifty paise coin.

She says she will take you

to the horseshoe shrine.

You’ve seen it already.

She hobbles along anyway

and tightens her grip on your shirt

She won’t let you go.

You know how old women are.

They stick to you like a burr.

You turn around and face her

with an air of finality.

You want to end the farce.

When you hear her say,

‘What else can an old woman do

on hills as wretched as these?’

You look right at the sky.

Clear through the bullet holes

she has for her eyes.

And as you look on,

the cracks that begin around her eyes

spread beyond her skin.

And the hills crack.

And the temples crack.

And the sky falls

With a plate-glass clatter

Around the shatterproof crone

who stands alone

And you are reduced

to so much small change

in her hand.

We all know and have experienced the persistence of beggars in India. I like his use of hyperbole, how nature itself cracks in front of the old woman. The reader participates in the meaning creation of the poem, inferring the narrator has cracked too, and put coins in the old woman's hand.

A Marathi poet, he is the only Indian poet apart from Kabir to be featured in World Classics by the New York Review of Books. I remember I bought his book Jejuri when I was in Delhi. I resonate with him because of his modern idiom.

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