Married Woman by Manju Kapur Page A

about two hundred poems, she felt she needed to go somewhere with them. Publication would make her work seem less futile, but how to get there? She started revising them, typing them out on the small portable typewriter Hemant had brought back from the States.
    After she did twenty she showed them to Hemant. As a man of the world, she trusted his sense of how to do things.
    ‘Poems?’ he remarked, looking pleased. ‘I didn’t know you were still writing.’
    Astha smiled and said, yes, she was still writing.
    The last he had seen her poems had been on their honeymoon, he reminisced, while Astha smiled some more. ‘That was about a lake‚’ he went on.
    ‘I don’t write about things like that now.’
    ‘You don’t?’
    ‘I’ve lost interest in Nature. I’m older, I think differently‚’ said Astha.
    ‘But you look as young‚’ responded Hemant automatically. He put his arm around her for a moment before turning his attention to her writing.
    Astha waited nervously. It was the first time anyone was seeing her poems. Hemant frowned, shuffling through the twenty typewritten sheets. To his wife’s horror he started reading one out in a puzzled voice:
                          Changes
    The eventual release from pain
    In the tearing relentless separation
    From those in habit loved
    Can come so slowly
    It seems there will never be a day
    Of final peace and tranquillity
    Who promised me, that if I
    Did gaze upon reality
    Accept it, embrace it, befriend it
    I would never suffer again
    But no matter how many times
    I heave the doorways of my soul

    To let the chill light in
    The darkness grows silently
    To hide me in the break of day.
    Hemant stared at her. Astha cringed. ‘Actually, forget it‚’ she said. ‘They probably need more working over.’
    ‘But I am here to help you‚’ said Hemant genially. ‘I personally thought the one you wrote in Srinagar was very good. I said so at the time, didn’t I?’
    Yes, you did, you did, you did. But now it’s all changed, and I want to bang my head against the wall because you never understand anything. ‘I thought you might help me in deciding what to do with them‚’ she said tense and calm.
    Hemant continued riffling through the papers, sparing her the embarrassment of more loud reading.
    ‘You don’t like them?’
    ‘I don’t know what to make of them. Look, I am no reader, but they sound rather bleak, don’t you think?’
    ‘Do they?’
    ‘Good heavens, Az, they are all about cages and birds, and mice, and suffering in situations that are not even clear. There is not one happy poem here.’
    ‘Poems are about emotions‚’ defended Astha. Maybe now he would ask her why she felt sad and they could really talk.
    ‘What kind of emotions? This person sounds positively neurotic.’
    ‘I don’t think so.’
    ‘If others read these poems, they might actually think you weren’t happy.’
    ‘No, no, they are not about me‚’ said Astha quickly.
    ‘I know that. But people are so quick to put two and two together and come up with five, quick to gossip, you know Az.’
    ‘Perhaps I should test that by sending them somewhere‚’ said Astha looking down, not wanting to see his face.
    Hemant looked doubtful. ‘Well, I don’t know, it’s up to you.’ He held out the poems and she took them forlornly.
    That night she thought long and hard of ‘Changes’. How self-indulgent it had sounded when Hemant had read it out. And this was one she had considered her best, evocative and moving. Maybe he was right, they were all too alike, she would be exposing herself to the world.
    She gave up writing and continued rather sadly to draw, sketching with the soft pencils and coloured charcoal that Hemant got her from Japan. Nobody could put two and two together about painting, say it was negative rather than positive, say she should paint lakes in Kashmir instead of mice, birds and cages. Maybe one day she could do something with her art, but