Melancholy Of Love
Sujata Lakhani Mirchandani
MY SUNSET MARRIAGE: ONE HUNDRED AND ONE POEMS by Hoshang Merchant Navayana, 2017, 232 pp., 295
April 2017, volume 41, No 4

‘… tuk-tuk … tuk-tuk … tuk-tuk …’, that’s how emotions are in the latest Hoshang Merchant’s work curated by poet Kazim Ali. The language of love gets explored subtly and consistently as they are introspected from within. To my reading this book poses the poet beyond the wave of ‘gay-poet of India’. The collection sketches Hoshang Merchant (hereafter H.M.) as a poet who has been intertwined with love but remains distinct from it. Love as confiding in nature to that of confining has come out clear in poems like.

‘Marine Conversation’. Silence plays an important part in all the poems, and this comes out as a reading of one’s life from a critical distance. A journey which one undertook for infinity and halts to look back in order to project on the future of what we call love, or the lack thereof.
It is like an intercepted message
It is a feather swirling emptily
in a dusty trough
It is the sun’s broken yolk
at evening
It is this empty room
where I write this— ‘Broken Love’

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