Book Review – Longings by Mukulika Batabyal
1 min read
Uday Khanna reviews Mukulika Batabyal’s poetry collection Longings (Published by Hawakal Publishers, 2022) observing how the poems raise pertinent questions.
It is not uncommon to come across poems, anthologies, or chapbooks, which make you meditate or contemplate on particular experiences that you had managed to unsuccessfully keep aside. What is perhaps rarer is to come across a book that manages to make the living come out of the pages and walk with you to the quaint corners of your memory and confront hurt the loss as a still gently breathing patient holding out for hope.
What Mukulika Batabyal achieves through her poetry is elevating the status of that hurt and negotiating with the immediacy of its effects, while also charting out a path to navigate through the malice towards a more hopeful promised land. The questions her poems raise pertain to the existence of such a promised land and how long one can hold out the hope of reaching it. But for Ms. Batabyal, what becomes more important is the journey and the idea of such a promised land; that the desert hides a well somewhere.
