Suhit Kelkar

Suhit Kelkar’s poetry has appeared in several Indian and international journals, including The Charles River Journal, Speak, Poetry at Sangam, Vayavya, The Bengaluru Review, The Indian Quarterly, and The Bombay Literary Magazine, among others. His short stories have appeared in Firstpost (India) and Out of Print magazine (India). His debut book is a poetry chapbook named The Centaur Chronicles (2018), which uses the figure of a centaur to explore themes of exclusion, discrimination and otherness. His book of photographs and haiku, Mumbai Monochrome, was released in 2020.

Poet’s Reflections

Dante bhau in Mahim West

by Suhit Bombaywala

None of your antiseptic plasticky multiplexes here: as far as I remember, Paradise movie theatre (Paradise E-Square, says no one) is one screen. Expect no food courts, there is a popcorn stand, a fragrant one, the fragrance of caramel popcorn seduces you at the ticket counter one floor below. Is it by design? Happy happy, you get soft drinks also. Definitely. I don’t remember if samosas are available. Probably.

You eat off paper plates on a balcony overlooking old residential buildings, a grungy looking commercial complex, a petrol pump under a banyan tree, and if you crane your head, a line of shops and restaurants including two plying Kerala-style cuisine — Sneha and Madina. It is like a pair of old jeans, worn and comfy.

Paradise is frequented by families, making it a nice place also for couples seeking out a flop movie which offers privacy in the dark. I speak of hearsay. Of course.

I’ve seen a few movies at Paradise, including Gully Boy, which I connected so much with, and am grateful for getting to see in Paradise. The movie was filmed in Dharavi a few kilometres away, and it has a few acquaintances of mine in supporting roles. My reality, partly mundane and partly grim, was larger than life on a stonking big screen. Kickass!

Paradise movie theatre, Mahim West, has and will have a soft, warm, neon-lit spot in my heart. Its screen, I’d like to think, showed me dreams are made of reality.

So, when Priya Sarukkai Chabria kindly asked me to write for Divining Dante, the parallels suggested by Dante’s paradise and the name of the movie theatre leaped up at me. The rest is poetry.

Divining Dante Poems 2023

Paradise Movie Theatre

Cleansing with the Stars

An Extra in the Inferno

Poet’s Note

Perhaps because my training and work has conditioned me thus, incidents from my life have only sparingly entered my poetry so far, at least for the most part. In most of my poems the ‘I’ belongs to a character that cannot be directly mapped onto my autobiography. The ‘I’ is thus a crystal, a prism for universal themes. Universality is important to me. And what could be more universal than mythology and folklore? Myths interest me deeply as repositories of cultural archetypes, as markers of belonging, and as motifs of inner life.

So far, another concern of mine is lucid writing– I use the word both in its sense of ‘clear’ and ‘luminous’. I feel that lucidity has several aspects. At this point in my journey I praise lack of clutter, transparency, and languor. For me these are not just stylistic pursuits but ways of seeing.

The poems here feature various mythological, folkloric and contemporary narrators, who are speaking of the inner forces which drive or have driven them to their destinies. They are from, possibly, my work-in-progress collection.