Treasurer of Piggy Banks

The contemporary Hindi poet Vinod Kumar Shukla (b. 1937) is often described as a “magic realist” or a “modernist,” but his work defies such easy categorization. Treasurer of Piggy Banks is Shukla’s first collection to appear in English, translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. One untitled poem opens: “That man put on a new woolen coat and went away like a thought,” and later continues:

There was a man standing under a tree.
In the mist it looked like he was standing inside his own blurred shape.
The blurred tree looked exactly like a tree.
To its right was a blurred horse of inferior stock,
looking like a horse of inferior stock.
[…]
If the man standing at that one spot under the tree was the boss,
then to him I was a horse at a gallop, horseshoes nailed to my boot soles.

The poem begins like a story (“there was a man,” “there was a horse”), except that the tree, the horse, and even morning itself quickly dissolve into incomplete metaphors (“Six in the morning was like six in the morning”). In the last few lines, something concrete and alarming emerges out of the blur: “the boss,” who has the power to make the poem all about him.

Shukla’s near-metaphors make the world, and everything in it, seem fragile. People and objects are only provisionally like themselves. Though Shukla’s figures may bend under the material harshness of the world, they are not determined by it.

These poems evince a deceptive ease—the many windows and apertures strewn through the book are inviting: “There was a window that lived in a wall / Because of that window, there lived a view:” But the reader has to wonder, can we ever become inhabitants of Shukla’s oblique world?

In the confusion of leaving home,
I leave it so far behind that everywhere I go
I’m seen as an infiltrator.
Infiltrator or inhabitant?