The Day We Went Strawberry Picking in Scarborough
By Ranu Uniyal
ISBN: 978-81-936025-8-4, Pp.: 81
Relevance of Gandhi in Contemporary Times
Anita Singh
Reading Gandhi: Perspectives in the 21st
The Day We Went Strawberry Picking in Scarborough by Ranu Uniyal essentially poeticizes a modern woman’s journey from innocence to experience. The tumultuous journey from joyful aspirations of love and companionship to betrayal, anguish, tears and
silences is full of flavours, rhythm, colours, and caresses. The bright lemon yellow cover of the poetic collection suitably anticipates the enchanting sensory sojourn the reader is to undertake.
A number of poems emerge like the music from a deep sad wound containing the “sullen hues of grief.” The poem “The taste of tongue” whispers the core of a woman’s experience. The persona explains the loss of sweetness of her tongue through a layered tale of invasion, dominion and destruction that transforms the land, culture, and language. The tale implies how seamless judgment, use and abuse are the “wicked troops” of patriarchy that rob women off their innocence turning the molasses into tart and pickle. It critically laments mythologies and histories that have nourished the hostile attitude to women:
pelted with stones circled in fire
unless we seek repentance
for our sins our lost souls will
wreath in cycles of despair
And,
ovaries gone ruptured cervix
broken tongue lost scripts razed rituals
curses nailed as oblique breasts
our unwholesome seeds will never bloom
The bodily images evoke the inadequacy and incompetency that have been associated to womenfolk.
Some other poems offer a critical glance at marriage. Marriage does not seem to be a pleasant experience. Rather, it turns out to be a “catalogue of bickering”, “hitting and swearing”, where “yearning (is) held hostage” and “love is the first casualty”. For the persona here marriage seems to have cost her identity and aspiration offering in return the hurtful experiences of conditioning and compromise: “I will merge my sadness and watch you seduce me with your seasoned lust.”
The poem “Why She Won’t” underlines how differences in marriage reach a tipping point and there remains no way out but to end the relationship:
Defer the differences; but it is never so simple
To forget the menacing starch as it stiffened his words
And slowly sat on your lap making it impossible