Sabitha Satchi’s debut poetry collection Hereafter surpasses all expectations from a first book. Hereafter is the work of a seasoned pen, with well-chiseled poems, backed with profundity of thought. The artwork in the book including the cover image is by the Kerala film maker and artist KM Madhusudhanan. Selections from Madhusudhanan’s ‘Oedipus Series’ separate the different sections in this poetry collection.
The poem ‘Forked Tongue’ forms the preface to the book and prefixes Sabitha Satchi as a writer ‘with a forked/ tongue’, a bi-lingual writer; Satchi writes in Malayalam as Sabitha TP. Hereafter encapsulates Satchi’s tryst with life and language—‘It struggled to pronounce Scle-/rosis, and instead, wrote of dancing/ feet, out of step with rhyme and time/ it sang of learning to walk in baby/ steps and learning to say ka kha ga gha/ A for Amma and L for Love/ and Life, in poetry.’
The poems segue effortlessly into the theme of dealing with the hereafter and ephemerality of life. Striking images are combined with a sense of firm balance and control in Satchi’s poetry. ‘Nudes’ carries four short poems, each etching a distinct picture in the mind. In ‘Nude with a Watch’—‘Time ticks on her naked/ wrist. It ticks, chronic…’; ‘Nude with a Syringe’ foregrounds the physical experience of the body grappling with pain, ‘…her thumb pushing in/ the needle past bruised skin/ and she thinks how lonesome/ it must be in the shivering blue’. Solitariness transitions to an expression of a deeper understanding of life in which ‘the pen/ is the knife that holds/ the world at a distance’. The poetic stance is likened to the heron, ‘…poised at the edge/ of the pond ready to take/ flight into the sky, bruised blue/ as her naked marked belly’. Satchi invokes not a muse but the strength of her body and mind as she asks, ‘give me the gift/ of tongues again’.