Tribune article by Gayatri Rajwade

Photo by Parvesh Chauhan

Writer-poet Kamla Kapur is back and this time she is gambolling amidst the Gods of the Indian Pantheon!

Emerging As of a Fountain in a Garden, her book of verses written to assuage her anguished soul after the suicide of her husband, poet Donald Dean Powell in 1993, she comes back transformed, retelling Hindu myths this time round.

And no colourless portrayals here, for the Gods speaking in an easy narrative style say so much of the universal truths of humanity, but without the sting of sermons.

‘Ganesh Goes to Lunch’ is Kamla’s ‘chant’ to an ongoing passion in myths and legends. In fact her first book of poetry Radha Sings published in 1987 comprises of Radha talking to Krishna through a series of love songs.

However, this book happened quite by chance. For one, after being in semi-retirement from teaching writing courses at Grossmont College in San Diego in California, she finally resigned to write full-time.

At this time, three stories, one each from Hindu, Sikh and Sufi beliefs, were published by ‘Parabola, A Journal of Myth, Tradition and Search for Meaning’ in New York and Raoul Goff Publisher for Mandala Press read them, met with Kamla and the book was commissioned.

The result is 24 stories, ‘developed from India’s rich and vast ocean of Hindu myths, legends, and folktales and whose timeless quality lends itself to reinterpretation in every age’ writes Kamla in her preface.

“It is easy to see how Indian myth has become the repository of all our wisdom and solace. The gods, like us, are all perishable, yet timeless, like Vishnu asleep on the primeval ocean, appearing and disappearing in his incarnations, like bubbles in the river of time,” she writes.

So what does Kamla bring to these ageless tales? “A lot” she laughs, “The oral3 tradition of mythology means that every story has several different versions and some of them were told to me in just one line. I have given these fables a narrative and a context, developed the characters and have also tried to modernise them,” she explains.

Yes it was difficult because researching these ‘mirages’, in a sense, were not easy since the deadline given by the publishers was just a few months. “What made it tolerable was I enjoyed doing this so much and there was so much I was taught,” she smiles.

In the course of her study she found hundreds of little tales worth telling but selected those she “resonated” with. “There is nothing rational about the process of intuition. It happens sub-consciously and you have to trust it,” she elaborates. But now when Kamla looks back at the book, she sees each aspect, each little learning sparkling like “separate beads but strung together by a single thread.”

Next in this magical series are stories of the ten Sikh Gurus or Janam Sakhis, six stories that have a narrative fibre but which can also be read individually and perhaps a similar book on Sufi tales.

‘My inspiration is the hologram. Where every little bit contains a whole of the same image,” says Kamla. Just like the myths themselves, present everywhere around us, in the names of trees, rivers, villages and temples and within each one of us, as an essence of a higher being.

Posted by kamla Oct 7th 2006

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